Would you spot a fake/clone Yonex Z-Force II badminton racquet?

With badminton racquets costing up to £200 these days there is a bit of a market for cheap “fakes” which can often appear on sites like eBay. The normal giveaway is the price, but the are sometimes explicitly advertised as “clone” racquets, and these days even at first glance you might not be able to spot from the hologram or shape of the logo that a racquet is a fake.

So here are some pictures of a real and “clone” Yonex Voltric Z-Force II. This racquet is one of Yonex’s popular high-end racquets, selling for around the £150 mark. The clone is around £30. It’s not necessarily a bad racquet for £30, but it’s certainly not the same as the real Z-Force II. In all these pictures the racquet on top is the clone, the one below (with the orange strings and blue grip) is the genuine one:

Here you can see there’s a difference in the frame. The genuine Z-Force II has the holes recessed a little and has a more complex design than the more traditional look to all the holes near the tee joint that the clone has.

This is a difference that’s quite noticeable to the stringer. The real Z-Force II has “channels” that stop the main strings covering the holes of the cross-strings towards the top of the racquet – the clone racquet doesn’t have this.

The shafts have almost identical printing on them – if you hadn’t seen them together you wouldn’t spot the differences, but the printing isn’t at the same place on the racquets. The Yonex logos next to the handle also don’t seem noticeably different, other than a very slight difference in the colour

Would you have spotted the fake? Unless you’d seen an original I think you’d have to be quite an expert in the racquets to notice. So don’t think that the bargain you’ve found on ebay for a high-end racquet being shipped China is necessarily going to get you a racquet the same as one five times the price. The clone is also lighter (not necessarily a problem) and doesn’t come with a copy of the full size Yonex cover, although it does feel noticeably cheaper than the real covers.

I’ll follow-up this article later with one that shows some racquets from other manufacturers that I will call “colour clones” which aren’t designed to be fakes, but have “suspiciously” similar colour schemes and names to some of the Yonex ones!