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Golf Equipment Chronicles 2007 (Part 6)

Why Your Driver is Obsolete

By Leith Anderson

. . .And Why You Should Worry About Your Driver Shaft

Almost five years ago, July 2002, I set out on my quest to find the "Magic Driver" and report the results in Golf Today. Some months were too much like Don Quixote tilting at windmills. Over the years the quest morphed into the Golf Equipment Chronicles. Luckily, my philosophy about life has always been that "it’s the journey, not the destination". In golf, you frequently find the magic but we all know it never lasts very long.

Last year wise men declared that significant improvements in driver performance would forever be prevented by USGA restrictions. Those of us who still hoped for a little magic from our drivers fell into depression.

And then 2007 exploded. The year that the wise men predicted would be totally boring for drivers has produced the most interesting new drivers since Taylor Made perfected the screw. If you’re still playing the same driver at the end of 2007 that was in your bag at the beginning of the year, I’ll buy you lunch at the Palo Alto Muni. If I’m really wrong, Don can set a banquet.

But I’m confident. I’m working with new information from industry moles and the Professional Clubmakers’ Society Expo in Louisville. I was there from March 9-11. Those were intense days. Experts were there: notably Tom Wishon who delivered a presentation that described his latest research on driver performance. Britt Lindsey from Golf Works showcased a ball fitting program that goes where no ball fitting has ever gone before. Shaft fitting made a leap forward with methods to match shaft bend profiles to a player’s swing. And there was a new shaft that deserves mention. Overall, the state-of-the-art advanced.

2007
The Year of Moment of Inertia (MOI)

The story behind the new generation of drivers is "Moment of Inertia" - MOI for short. Moment of inertia is measured by sophisticated electronic gizmos and expressed in standard gobbledygook - g-cm2 - where "g" stands for grams and "cm2" is centimeters squared. The term is spoken as "grams (pause) centimeters squared" which I prefer to simplify as "MOI whatever units". Most older drivers measure in the 4000 to 4300 "MOI whatever units" range. Last year, the Nike Sasquatch was the highest at 4700. This year the new SUMO is 4950 and the SUMO 2 is 5300. Most of our early hands-on experience was with the SUMO and SUMO2 because Nike was the first company to make its new designs available for testing.

High Moment of Inertia is touted as "resistance to twisting" around an axis that goes through the vertical center of gravity of a driver head. The claim is that you get the driver back to the ball in square position so you hit the ball straighter. That’s not pure hype. In a recent round at Poppy Ridge I surprised myself with the best (straightest) driving round of my life. I used the SUMO 2. Additional anecdotal evidence is appearing daily. Of the SUMO2 drivers sold at the Golf Lab since February 3rd (SUMO Saturday), players have returned to report unusual accuracy. Some even call the new-found consistency "boring" Although no players reported extraordinary distance gains, nobody asked for their money back. Some players believe that the SUMO2 might indeed be a bit shorter than other drivers. Some testers report declines in ball speed, others have seen no such declines. The debate is active.

Subplot: The Industry Against Square

The easiest way to design a driver with high moment of inertia is to change the conventional driver shape to square. (MOI increases by moving weight as far back and away from the heel and toe of a driver head as possible.) That’s the route that Nike took. That’s also the route that Callaway took with its new FT-i driver - their version of square. So far only Nike and Callaway are betting on the square shape for 2007. Taylor Made, Titleist and the other manufacturers are acting like they got caught with their pants down. It’s too late for them to rush a square model to market without looking like copycats so every company that does not have a square driver is eager to explain why the square shape will be a flash in the pan - at least that’s what they’re hoping. Meantime, the whole world is making up new pro and anti-MOI stories.

The president of Taylor Made went so far as to predict that the square phenomenon would be over by the end of the summer. By then $459 SUMO2’s should be selling for $199 on eBay.

In one of the more hilarious developments of the "Great MOI Argument" - Taylor Made - in a transparent effort to get a dog in the hunt - went to extremes. They invented their own MOI formula that gives extra credit to the supposed benefits of their variable thickness face technology. Guess what? The proprietary Taylor Made "eMOI" calculation gives their moveable weight Super Quad a higher number than the SUMO2. Just in case the MOI story turns out to have legs, they made up a number for their marketing guys to work with.

There are plenty of other high MOI models coming to the market. Not all are square. The new Adams driver looks like a Portobello mushroom and is rated at 5000 g-cm2 - and that’s before we doctored it up. Nickent is out with a high MOI story. Titleist pasted high MOI on their new 907 series - one for "forgiveness" and the other for "distance". Tour Edge followed the Titleist and went for the long face to back styling - reminiscent of an ice cream cone. Online forums seem to favor the Callaway model. Alas, I have no personal experience with Callaway since they’re still scarce on eBay. Overall, that’s not bad for a bunch of companies that couldn’t even spell MOI six months ago - and obviously wish they didn’t have to today.

It’s a little early to call the game. In the golf crazy Midwest and Northeast it’s still winter. We won’t know for sure if the unconventional square shape is here to stay until they play it in Chicago. The world knows that in California we go for any weird idea.

Tom Wishon’s Research and Opinions

There is opinion and there is science. At the PCS Expo, Tom Wishon described a research project that he commissioned to try to determine if square drivers could be proven to be straighter. Here’s what happened:

Tom postulated that if a player hits his drive on the center of the club face it will go straight, regardless of the head shape. OK, forget solid strikes. Players miss almost all their shots anyway. The most common miss with a driver is a little high on the face and a little toward the toe. Tom wanted to know if a square driver would be straighter on such a slightly off-center impact. The analysis was computer modeled.

The conclusion from the research project was that the square driver would in fact hold a face angle a little closer to square on an off-center hit - but not by much. Wishon’s research concluded that the square driver would be straighter by just half a degree. The research did not quantify what that half a degree would mean to a player. Would it be ten feet or ten yards straighter in the landing area? That’s still an unanswered question.

Despite the fact that the effect of half a degree was not quantified, Wishon concluded that it was not enough to issue a buy recommendation on Nike or Callaway stock.

Rather than hope for a miracle, Tom suggested some other ideas that might be just as effective as buying a new high MOI driver. Here are some of his ideas that we have taken to heart in our daily work at the Golf Lab.

Tweaking Your Current Driver

MOI is influenced by driver head weight. Each 1 gram of head weight added to your driver will increase the MOI by approximately 35 g-cm2. Most driver heads today weigh 200 grams or a bit less. Most drivers are also 45" long, or even longer. Manufacturers target swingweights to D-0 or D-1. If you want to improve the performance of your current driver, here’s what you can do:

Add eight to twelve grams of weight to your driver head with stylish lead tape - scientifically applied around the back. The head weight will now be 208-212 grams and the MOI will increase by 280 to 420 g-cm2. If your driver is average it will measure about 4600 g-cm2 before treatment. With 400 extra "whatever units" it will be up to about 5000 g-cm2. That’s more than a brand new SUMO.

At the same time, cut at least an inch off of your shaft. You may need to trim from the tip to stiffen the shaft to make up for the extra head weight. The inch you cut off will decrease swingweight by six points. But each two grams of additional head weight adds back one swing weight point. So, it’s a wash. You get a shorter driver, with higher MOI that you’ll hit straighter and maybe farther. Swingweight stays the same.

If you’re a strong player, you might even decide to add a little more weight. Tour pros seem to favor clubs with higher swingweights than off the shelf models. In our testing, we use a launch monitor to measure performance, most clearly demonstrated by higher ball speed. If you have access to a clubfitters with a launch monitor, a very interesting experiment is to hit a series of shots with your club at D-0 swingweight. Then, add a couple of swingweight points at a time (2 grams on the head equals one swingweight point.) Compare the results. In our testing at the Golf Lab, we frequently find that players achieve the highest ball speed with swingweights in the D-4 to D-6 range. You might also back up your launch monitor testing with impact tape on the club face to make sure consistency doesn’t suffer. We frequently improve driver performance, both distance and accuracy with a little bit of lead tape.

Two Driver Myths

A natural compliment to increasing MOI with additional head weight is to shorten the length of your driver. Most men would rather go in for adult circumcision than cut an inch off of their drivers, believing that extra length always yields extra distance. Since seeing is believing, here’s another experiment that will solve the "longer is better" issue once and for all.

Test your driver at its current length with a launch monitor and record the results. You’re mainly interested in ball speed. At the Golf Lab, we use air pressure to install grips so we can trim a shaft, reinstall the grip and the club is ready to hit immediately. Trim your driver and hit a second set of test shots. Compare results. In our testing with hundreds of players at the Golf Lab, we have not found a single player who recorded a significant decrease in ball speed after we cut his driver from 45" to 44.5". Many players were surprised to find that their ball speed actually increased. Consistency also improves as measured by tighter dispersion patterns, more consistent ball speeds, trajectories and average distance.

The second myth is the location of the sweet spot. Today, most players believe that the sweet spot on a driver face is a little above the center line. Wishon calls that belief, politely, "hogwash". Due to the design of driver faces, the effective loft of your driver is a little higher above the center line. When you catch the ball a little high, the extra distance that you notice comes from the correct launch angle, not a trampoline face. Wishon’s conclusion: get a driver fitted with the correct loft and hit the ball on the center of the face for best distance.

If all of this sounds a little like voodoo and you’d like to see proof, any competent clubmaker with the right tools can measure and compare performance. Not only can you find the efficiency of your current driver, you can watch your results as your current driver improves right before your eyes. At a minimum, you’ll hit your driver more consistently.

One More Tweak

Don’t forget that before you’ve got your driver totally decked out there’s one more step. Counterweights under the grip add 2-3 more MPH of ball speed for almost all players. You’ve got to test with a launch monitor to find which weight works the best - there’s no good way to guess. Above all, don’t trust your feel. Just hit your driver without a weight. Install a 10 gram weight, go again. Install a 20 gram weight, go again. You will know if 15 minutes. At the Golf Lab, we use the Balance-Certified system for its ease of use. Go to http://www.balance-certified.com for more information.

Shaft Fitting Breakthroughs

It is now common knowledge that golfers should not rely on the flex designations that they find on clubs that they buy off the rack. The whole world knows that one manufacturer’s X flex can be another manufacturer’s R. Players trust their club makers to help them get the right shafts installed in their clubs to match their swings.

Most club makers have adopted a method of measuring and comparing flex known as "frequency matching". The shaft is clamped in a vice and oscillated. The oscillations are counted by a meter. The faster the shaft vibrates, the stiffer the flex. The value, measured in cycles per minute or CPM, is located on a graph called a "slope chart". I have covered the PCS Equalizer and other methods for measuring and interpreting flex in prior articles which can be found archived on www.calgolftech.com. I’ll not go back over that ground.

The Equalizer was released over six years ago at a time when we didn’t understand graphite shafts as well as we do today. The Equalizer was designed to take a single reading of shaft flex, now known as "butt frequency". The section of the shaft that the Equalizer measures is just below the grip, roughly 14" from the butt end of the club. The Equalizer knows nothing about shaft flex in the middle of the shaft and at the tip.

Since 2001, graphite shaft designers have become much more sophisticated. They learned how to layer graphite material in ways that moved flex and strength up and down the shaft. Some shafts were designed with soft tips to help players hit the ball in the air. A soft tip could be combined with a stiff butt and flexible mid-section or any other combination. Stiff tips are effective for Tour players and low index amateurs that load the shaft heavily. It became obvious that not all shafts that shared the same butt frequency reading played the same. Clubmakers began to adapt without knowing exactly what they were doing. They began to describe some shafts as playing "true to flex" and others stiffer of softer than indicated by the CPM reading and position on the slope chart. Trusting a single frequency reading, even from a trained clubmaker, became unreliable.

Three years ago club makers began to measure flex at points along the entire length of the shaft. The technique was pioneered by Hot Stix Golf in Scottsdale, Arizona but their method required too much sophisticated equipment to gain broad acceptance. Clubmakers turned to testing the "zone frequency" of shafts at defined points. Early attempts, unfortunately, didn’t make much sense due to the difficulty of measuring the frequency at the tip of the shaft. The breakthrough came when Tom Wishon suggested going to a 454 gram weight for zone profiling. That worked. Before long, club makers had access to databases of shaft flex profiles. Tom Wishon began offering the database as a product through his company, Tom Wishon Golf Technologies. The value to Wishon was obvious. His company sells private label shafts so the zone profiling database allowed club makers to match Wishon shafts to mainstream brands that they already knew. Alas, nothing was done to help club makers utilize zone profiling to do a better job of fitting their customers correctly.

Some innovators devised methods to detect a player’s tempo and the way they apply power (load) to the club and utilized that information in fitting shafts. The most useful of those gizmos is the Max Out Shaft Max, invented by Mitch Voges. The Shaft Max reports tempo, acceleration and tip deflection. At present, it is the best tool to help a club fitter match the correct shaft to a player’s swing. Unfortunately, the Shaft Max is only available to a limited number of Max Out affiliate club fitters. It is not a commercial product.

Jerry Hoefling’s PCS Masters Project

Jerry Hoefling Sr. was voted the Professional Clubmakers’ Society Clubmaker of the Year in 2004. He was one of the first PCS members to adopt and perfect shaft profiling in a small shop environment. He knew that what was missing with zone profiling was a way to test and measure a golfer’s swing and match that swing to an appropriate shaft. He’s been working on the answer to that question for two years and he presented his method at the PCS Expo. With help from Glen Tostrick, the training coordinator at PCS, and Bob Dodds, the PCS Technical Director, Jerry devised a fitting protocol that measured a player’s swing speed, tempo and moment of release and utilized that data to choose the correct shaft based on the shaft profile. A precise description of Jerry’s method is too complex for this article but a summary is possible.

A shaft flex profile is based on seven readings. Frequency is measured at 41", 36", 31", 26", 21", 16", and 11". This method is only for driver shafts.

Jerry made some assumptions about the hundreds of shafts that he has tested and included in his shaft profile database. The first is that there are three "zones" in a shaft. The first zone is the ten inches from the 41" mark. It is defined by frequency readings at 41" and 36". Jerry’s method says that the butt section flex is appropriately set by the Equalizer method based on swing speed.

The second zone is the next fifteen inches - the mid section of the shaft. The zone is defined by frequency readings at 31", 26’, and 21". Jerry’s method says that the appropriate flex in the mid section of the shaft is properly determined by a player’s tempo.

The third zone is the tip of the shaft defined by frequency readings at 16" and 11". Jerry’s fitting method says that the flex of the tip is determined by a player’s release.

In order to facilitate matching swing parameters to shafts from the database, Jerry worked a little magic. He determined "averages" for butt, midsection and tip frequencies and assigned PCS Equalizer values. In Jerry’s system it is possible to describe a shaft flex by saying it is a PCS 5.5 at the butt, PCS 6.5 in the mid section and PCS 7.0 at the tip.

Utilizing the PCS Equalizer methodology as a starting point, Jerry sets the butt flex value. For example a 100 MPH swing speed yields a 5.5 Equalizer flex value. A 5.5 flex value is a classic Equalizer stiff. From there, Jerry adds or subtracts partial points based on tempo and release. A player with a tempo faster than .9 seconds would be assigned a flex value of plus three tenths or 5.8. That value determines the flex in the middle of the shaft. Release is determined by video analysis and determines the flex value for fitting the tip section of the shaft. A player who releases at 9 o’clock is "average". Jerry adds .3 flex value for each hour on the clock. Eight o’clock is plus three tenths, seven o’clock plus another three tenths, and so forth. A player who swings at 100 MPH with a very late, 6 o’clock release would be assigned a tip flex value of 6.4 (5.5 plus .9).

In Jerry’s system a player receives a fitting that produces three values: one for swing speed, one for tempo and the third for release. Those values are then matched to specific shafts from the databases.

Utilizing Jerry’s system, the level of precision in shaft fitting is much higher. A player with a 100 MPH swing speed could have a slow tempo and very late release. That player would be fitted with a shaft profiled from Jerry’s database as 5.5, 5.2, 6.4. The software then searches the database for the closest shaft match.

The breakthrough thinking is a combination of two factors. First, to assign fitting values to three aspects of a player’s swing, rather than concentrating only on swing speed. Second: profiling shafts into zones that match the fitting parameters. The result is that players are going to have a much better understanding of their individual swings and infinitely better opportunity to test shafts that match their swing characteristics. In the past, choosing a driver shaft was almost always left to random experimentation.

Of course, none of this is any good unless you have access to the shaft data. Jerry is working with the Professional Clubmakers’ Society to make the data available to members, together with a program that searches the database to find appropriate shaft matches. This is a system that is simple enough for an individual clubmaker to incorporate into his fitting procedure. My advice? If you’re trying to find the right shaft to match your swing, make sure that your clubmaker is taking advantage of the latest thinking in shaft zone profiling.

True Temper Epic Shaft

There’s been so much hype around nanotechnology in the golf business that I almost don’t read press releases that include that much-abused term. Nanotechnology in the golf business, at least up until now, has been pretty meaningless.

True Temper just brought a new shaft to the market called the Epic. This one has NanoTechnology - with a capital "T". To begin, it’s not just True Temper buying a jar of pixie dust to mix into the graphite resin. The underlying technology was not invented by True Temper which might be another source of confidence. It was invented by an aerospace company as an application for a technique for binding graphite and other base materials with super-strong nickel-based compounds. The binding occurs at a molecular level.

Here’s the demo: the company takes two ping pong balls. The first one gets smashed between two fingers. The second one gets coated with the magic nickel material and a stack of weights is layered on until the ping pong ball supports 200 pounds. We’re expecting to receive a store demo that we can let our customers stand on. Now, that will be a demo we can all understand. But, does it work for golf clubs?

The shaft is manufactured in three stages. The graphite blank comes from China. It receives the coating in Mexico and is painted and decorated in the US. It is a classic silver color with graphics that are reminiscent of the 60’s in San Francisco.

We received a couple to test and immediately PUREd them. One was mounted in a SUMO2. On the frequency machine the Epic tested 282 CPM - which places it in a flex range north of XX Stiff. (But as we now know, butt frequency doesn’t tell the whole story.) On the course, the Epic was interesting. The Epic was very straight in the SUMO2 and surprisingly didn’t leak right. On the other hand, I’m still afraid that the S flex is way too stout for my 105 MPH swing speed.

Fuji Bob mounted the Epic in his driver for a couple of rounds. His report is also that it is very straight, although not as long as his 55 gram Fukikura Rombax in X flex. The Epic might very well be more important for utilities, fairways and irons which are clubs that we value for accuracy above distance. As usual, it will take a little more time to be sure that the Epic is going to earn its hefty price.

On the Radar Screen: Ball Fitting Software

I’m just going to give this one a brief mention. At the PCS Expo, Britt Lindsey from Golf Works presented a program that takes ball fitting to the next level. Ball fitting is one of the great unknowns in overall fitting. Other companies, including Max Out Golf Labs have systems in development. Next month, look for a definitive answer about how to choose the right ball to fit your game.

If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, join me for a nine-hole round: "morning at the Muni". Most weekdays I meet up with friends and customers to dominate the back nine at the Palo Alto Municipal golf course. After that, we have breakfast at Don’s Place. All you have to do is pay your own greens fee. Give a call to the Golf Lab the day before to make sure we’re on.

I’ll be back next month. In the meantime, don’t miss any three footers.

Leith Anderson is a Partner in the Golf Lab, Palo Alto, CA.
He will answer any and all questions relating to club fitting and club making. Contact: Leith@calgolftech.com.