Adjustable drivers. They are all the rage right now. From slider weights to hosels that change the loft 3 degrees in any direction, driver heads aren’t as simple as they used to be. Actually, let me take that back. It’s not as simple as it was when metal woods hit the market back in the late 80’s and early 90’s. With the invention of so many technologies, shopping for drivers (and golf clubs in general) has taken on a crazy new form of trial and error with quite a chunk of change being spent on swing analysis and club fitting. In fact, it’s not abnormal to see someone spend $300 to find out which $400 driver is going to work the best for them. Even after all of that time and cash, the first thing that happens is that club doesn’t perform the way it did on the launch monitor and the tweaking begins. 99% of the time, this is due to one, grossly overlooked feature of clubs, the shaft.
Long ago, when woods were still wood, all of this custom weighting and CG movement was accomplished by removing the sole plate of the club, drilling a small hole and filling it with lead. Craftsmen could straighten a slice, create a more penetrating ball flight or even just make a head feel more substantial at the end of the shaft in moments. For quick fixes and testing, lead tape could be applied to club heads to get an idea of the effect and to customize the settings prior to creating the new head. Lofts were adjustable by sanding the face to the correct loft, then recreating the bulge and roll of the face. Different inserts gave golfers the feel they wanted in the club. You could even sand the head down completely and change the look of the club by changing the stain or paint that was applied to it. It was the ultimate custom club experience.
Fast forward a few years to when the metal wood came out. These were not solid clubs, so you couldn’t fill them like a wooden head. They had a dead feel and came in a few lofts since you couldn’t change them by hand. That was, until one fateful day when Taylor Made Golf introduced the first ‘real’ metal wood. The original Taylor Made driver featured a small port on the bottom of the club that allowed club makers the ability to customize the head, just like the old wood woods, but without having to do quite as much work. Many claim that the port on the bottom of the club was added so they could remove shavings and epoxy from the head, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say that it was for adjustability. As time went on, those ports went away and we were back to just using stock heads.
As more people moved towards these non-customizable clubs, club makers found a new way to customize the flight of the ball. By changing the characteristics of the shaft, club makers could change the ball flight very easily. If a person had trouble getting the ball in the air off the tee, the answer used to be for the club maker to increase the loft of the club and add more weight in the bottom of the head. With the new shafting options available, this now became finding a shaft with a lower kick point, or bend point. A lower bend point means the shaft will flex more towards the head and virtually ‘flick’ the ball higher into the air. The opposite is true if a player is hitting the ball too high. A shaft with a bend point closer to the grip end will provide less kick and keep the ball lower off the tee. The options of shaft fittings was endless. From steel to aluminum, titanium to graphite, there were shaft options to make a ball do just about everything under the sun in the air, and club makers were thrilled.
Moving on a step further, and to the point of this post, club technology has once again moved onward with the new adjustable hosel and weighting designs. It drives club makers crazy, since customization is now found in almost every club, but it makes manufacturers happy as they only need to produce one or two heads to cover just about every swing style on the planet. While this is technically great, the problem with this is that most shops are overlooking the shaft fit when they adjust the club head out. The force the ball downward by decreasing the loft and moving weight upward instead of having the higher bend point shaft installed in the club. They move weight around on the head and increase the loft to change to a higher flight pattern instead of trying a lower kick point shaft. In other words, they try and force players into a $500 off the shelf driver that really doesn’t fit their game as well as it could.
A custom fitting should start with the basics. If you measure out standard, that’s is fantastic, but that doesn’t mean your swing is standard at all. Golfers that swing “flatter” will tend to push the ball or hit draws – with the tendency to start hooking it. Players with a more upright swing will tend to slice the ball and hit pulls when they close the face off. The loft and weighting of the head will do almost nothing to help this situation, but the right shaft can. For someone that swings slower and slices, a lighter weight shaft with more whip can help them get the club into a better position and complete their swing in a way that will deliver straighter shots.
Shafts are often the most overlooked part of the fitting process today. With all the tweaks that are available in weighting and lofts, most store sales people and fitters often resort to selling off the rack shafting options instead of properly fitting your swing to the right shaft. Now, unless you’re looking to eek out every last yard from a club, you are almost going to do as well with a $30 generic driver as you will with a $500 ‘custom’ one, but that’s a debate for another day. For now, just remember, when you go get fitted for your new driver, if you are going to sink that much money into a fitting, make sure they test various shafts to check your launch angle with each one prior to tweaking everything else on the head. Before we had all this technology, the shaft was one of the most custom parts of a club and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be still today.
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