California Golf Technologies

What's new on the West Coast

Golf Equipment Chronicles 2003 (Part 7)

By Leith Anderson

More Than You Ever Wanted to Know About Flex
(And, what happened to the Magic Driver?)

It was an awfully wet December in Northern California. Palo Alto and Shoreline were in their competitive quiet season. If I didn't dig up a little money game with Reed at Eagle Ridge, the highlights film would have been real short. Plus, the Magic Driver is in the morgue and we almost wore out the Distance Caddy trying to find a new one. And the Pelz wedges smiled and then frowned.

But, first things first. The most common question coming into the Golf Lab this month was "How do I know the right driver shaft flex for my swing?" If you're like Tiger, you just order up 200 drivers from Nike and try them all. For the rest of us, there has to be a more economical answer.

If you're confused by the question, you've got lots of company. Golf Today readers know that I hang out on the Golf Equipment Aficionados Forum on Delphi every day. A few days ago, a "newbie" asked a simple question. "If my driver freqs ('freaks') out at 253 CPM in a 5 inch clamp at 45 inches, what is the flex?"

Five clubmakers had enough self confidence to answer the question within an hour. It surely won't surprise you that no two were the same. The estimates came in from 5.0 to 7.5. We'll get into what those numbers might actually mean later, but they were saying that the driver in question was anything from a "hard regular" to a "solid X". And each of these guys thought he was right! I don't want to forget that a few other answers came in to the effect that "flex doesn't matter" or "you can't measure it anyway". So now you know the State of the Art.

Alpha (L, S, R, S, X) versus Numeric (4.0, 5.0, 6.0, 7.0) Flex Values

If you started playing golf more than twenty years ago, buying golf clubs was simple. Your choice was Hogans, Wilsons or MacGregors. If you were a member of an exclusive country club, you might have ordered your clubs custom made by Kenneth Smith. Choosing shaft flex was no problem either. If your handicap was under 15, you bought stiff. Over 15 you bought regular. If you were an invalid, you thought about an "A" flex (but you bought regular). If you were Jack Nicklaus or George Bayer, you bought X. There was no such thing as 1" over and 2* up. If your clubs felt too short, you learned to bend your knees. End of story.

In those days long before corporate misbehavior and stupidity got on the news every night, we never imagined that the shafts might not be what the label said. We never imagined that minimum wage assembly workers could have made a mistake. It was your responsibility to "fit your clubs". It was normal to have a club or two that caused trouble. We never blamed the clubs for not fitting the player. Those were the days of Integrity. Everyone knew that Ben Hogan trashed the first production run from his new company because they didn't meet his standards. We trusted Ben.

Then about 1973, an earlier incarnation of the Royal Precision shaft company, now famous for Rifle shafts, invented a new way to measure flex. The breakthrough system involved clamping the grip end of a club in a stationary fixture and "twanging" (no kidding, that's the scientific term) the shaft over an electric eye that measured the "cycles per minute" or CPM. The higher the CPM, the stiffer the flex.

They also invented a way to illustrate their system with a "slope chart". The fundamental idea behind the slope chart is that you locate a point (numeric flex value) on a grid between club length on the horizontal axis and CPM on the vertical axis. The point will lie on a slope line. Each slope line represents a flex value. Although each club gets stiffer as it gets shorter, the notion is that a set of club "matches" as long as each club stays parallel to the slope line.

It must have been "Precision" in the company name that made them figure that each flex should be divided into ten sub-flexes. In the early days, the Royal Precision "system" would have classified 5.0 as "regular" 6.0 as "stiff" and 7.0 as "X". This opened a lot of possibilities. Golfers started to think that there was such a thing as a "Precision Fit". I was excited when I bought a custom set of 6.7 Rifles from Ed Montgomery at Montech Golf in Palm Springs in the early 90's. They were the best clubs I ever had up until that time. Needless to say, Royal Precision was in a position to benefit if golfers adopted their new system because they were the only company who could supply a shaft that met the requirements of their own system. That's "Yankee Ingenuity" - American Style.

Royal Precision also followed the traditional concept that shafts should get stiffer as they become shorter. This model resulted in a model that "sloped" at approximately 8.6 cycles per inch through the set. The Rifle slope was similar in practice to the True Temper (taper tip) model. The following illustration shows a simplified conventional slope chart for a set of irons.

Good Ideas Get Copied (but maybe not for the better)

It didn't take long for other club and shaft manufacturers to figure out that Royal Precision might have discovered a good thing. Measuring frequency was pretty easy. All through the seventies and eighties various sets of "frequency matched" clubs appeared. It was mainly the secondary companies, like Ram and the formerly proud MacGregor that were looking for a competitive edge that tried to sell frequency matching. The only problem was that golfers didn't seem to care. No one tried to explain exactly why frequency matching would help them play better.

A big part of the confusion was because measuring frequency was never standardized. Some used five inch clamps, some seven inch, some three inch. Some tested shafts with the grip on, some with the grip off. Some twanged horizontally, some vertically. Some used 260 gram weights, some used 205 gram weights, some attached the actual head temporarily. Worse, any combination of the above might have been tried. The obvious result is that comparing frequencies from two different systems was just like the old "apples to oranges" problem. If you didn't know EXACTLY how the frequency was measured, it was impossible to even guess the true flex of the club.

The PCS Equalizer Standard

There was no group more affected by the lack of standards than the Professional Clubmakers' Society (PCS). Members had different kinds of frequency machines and drove each other crazy trying to understand, discuss, and match flex. An initiative lead by Canadian David Eagar devised a way to make comparing "apples to apples" possible.

The PCS sells a calibrated shaft and a customized Excel spreadsheet as its "Equalizer" system. Each clubmaker inserts the calibrated shaft in his frequency machine and takes a reading. He then enters that value in a cell in the Excel spreadsheet. The spreadsheet then reformats into a true standard. Once calibrated, any PCS member using the Equalizer system will determine precisely the same "flex value" as any other PCS member, regardless of the equipment or method he uses. A 5.5 in California is a 5.5 in Massachusetts. That's a stiff.

The New Numbers

The PCS Equalizer produces a slope chart that looks like the old Royal Precision chart, but the flex values are very different. The PCS Equalizer system places the midpoint of Regular flex at a flex value of 4.5. Stiff is 5.5. X is 6.5. At the lower end of the range, Senior is 3.5 and Ladies is 2.5. To be fair, there is still a little argument going on among the members about the exact placement of the midpoint, but it's boiled down to about five cycles.

The PCS is constantly upgrading the Equalizer system and is about to release a new version. For the first time, non-PCS members will be able to purchase the system. The Equalizer system is slowly being adopted by shaft manufacturers who are finally realizing that they do their customers no favor by selling them shafts that don't perform as expected. SK Fiber is the first manufacturer to endorse the PCS Equalizer system.

Shaft manufacturer support is particularly important to help golfers understand exactly what they're getting. Unfortunately, a lot of confusion still exists. For example, we recently built a set of clubs for a top amateur to the PCS 6.0 standard (Stiff +). To get PCS 6.0, we used Rifle 4.5's and soft stepped them twice. Our experience tells us that most Rifle users inadvertently buy shafts that are not only much too stiff, but much stiffer than they think they're getting. On the PCS system, Rifle shafts test out a flex to a flex and a half stiffer than the label suggests. If you are playing 5.5 Rifles you should get them tested. They might be a solid X.

We have found the same disparities with True Temper S-300's. They always test out to X on the PCS system, and frequently go "off the charts" in the short irons.

I included a schematic illustration of a slope chart with this article but format limitations prevent showing full detail. If you would like a detailed copy of the same PCS Equalizer slope chart that we use at the Golf Lab, you can download one from the California Golf Technologies website: www.calgolftech.com. Keep in mind; it will only be accurate if the equipment used to take the readings is calibrated with a special shaft from the PCS.

Why Should You Care About Flex?

The most obvious reason is distance. A shaft that is too stiff will cost you distance. In the case of the top amateur I just referenced, there was about a six yard advantage between his S-300's (flexed at PCS 7.0) and Rifles (flexed at PCS 6.0). Swingspeed was the same; distance increased. That may not sound like much, but it's half a club.

We are not only focused on distance. We believe that distance might be the least important of three key factors. The other two are consistency and feel.

If you play shafts that are too stiff, your body knows. Your body knows you have to "step on it" to make a good shot. That leads to tension, pressure and missed shots. If you want to prove this theory for yourself, find a clubmaker with advanced electronics and a good set of test clubs and you will see inconsistency show up in erratic distances, swingspeed and ball speed off the face. The same tests work for both woods and irons.

Choosing the "Right" Flex

It would be great if fitting for flex were as simple as finding swingspeed and matching that to a flex value. That's still not the case. Swingspeed "gets you in the ballpark" but finding the right flex is still an artistic process that requires a lot of experimentation. In the last few months, for players that want to be absolutely sure that they have the "perfect" set of clubs, we have conducted fittings "club by club".

Finding the right flex is tedious, but not too difficult. If you have advanced electronics and a good set of test clubs at about half-flex intervals, you can hit a series of test shots and record carry distance, swingspeed and ball speed off the face of the club. If you divide ball speed by swingspeed, you get a ratio popularly known as the "smash factor". The ball comes off the face at a speed higher than the club head speed. That ratio will be between 1.25 and 1.50. To find the perfect flex, you increase shaft flex (swingspeed) until the "smash factor" (ball speed) begins to decrease. The perfect flex is the point where swingspeed is the highest and ball speed off the face is also the highest. When flex gets too soft, ball speed and carry distance will begin to decrease. This is because a shaft that is too soft does not have the "backbone" to carry the clubhead energy through to the ball.

If you have access to a launch monitor, that same information will be reinforced by knowing the "launch angle" and "spin rate". You may not need that degree of detail.

There is a small minority of clubmakers who are convinced that the "conventional slope" is as wrong as the "conventional wisdom". These clubmakers advocate finding a favorite club and then matching all of the other clubs in your set on a single frequency. This method is the "flat line slope". The notion is that to feel the same, each club should test at the same frequency, not the conventional wisdom that shorter clubs must get stiffer. This is an attractive idea because it makes sense. On average, the softer the flex in a club, the better the feel. Flat line slope theorists come out high on the feel scale. A flat line slope chart would look something like this:

The Modified Flat Line Slope

Testing that we have done at the Golf Lab has shown that the flat line slope won't work for everyone. As a practical matter, we're not sure it is right for anyone.

In our testing, we have found that excessively soft short irons will lose distance for most players. This distance loss can be as much as 20 yards on a 9 iron for an accomplished amateur player. This is despite the fact that soft clubs feel great.

Our current thinking and experience suggests that a modified flat line slope might make the most sense for the majority of players. Long irons play relatively softer to promote tempo. Mid irons step up the frequency chart to promote consistency. Short irons take another step up the frequency chart. A modified flat line slope might look something like this:

The only way you will know what is the right setup for you is to find a clubmaker and go through the testing. You should make sure that your clubmaker is familiar with the PCS Equalizer system.

The "Pretender" at Eagle Ridge

I couldn't resist. We've had about a dozen of the Cobra 427's come through the Golf Lab for reshafting, mostly with the Light Revolution shafts from SK Fiber. It's the consensus "hot one" so I bought a Cobra. Great deal: $250 with tax. I felt a little stupid to take a brand new club and throw the shaft away before I even played it once. Besides, I'd have to admit I paid $250 for a head. So I left it alone and took it out to play against Reed at Eagle Ridge. Mistake. MISTAKE. It had one of the new UST shafts. Said it was "Stiff". With grip on, it flexed out to 267 at 45" - a solid X.

It was a classic "too stiff" result. I yanked into a bunker left on one. It stayed in the bag for a few holes and then I let up a little and got a low fade on five. Straight into the trees on eight. Proving the "blind hog" theory, I hit a "best ever" drive on the impossible ninth. Muscled into the bunker left again on ten. Perfect on eleven. Low right into a bunker on twelve. Into the bag for the duration, too scary on the back nine. I was luck I only lost ten bucks.

The shaft is out. It's now a $250 head. I tried the SK Fiber Light Revolution and got it to the course once. It was one of those drippy days. The course was wet and the wind was up so the distances were not spectacular. With one exception: I flew one over the right bunker on the par five fifteenth that I usually don't carry in the winter and got on in two with a three iron. Maybe it was worth it. . . In any event, it's in the bag (for now).

Meantime, the Magic Driver is dead. Split wide open right at the bottom of the face. I'd like to think it was my powerful swing, but titanium drivers are supposed to sustain a 105 MPH swingspeed. So I called Nicklaus Golf. The Airmax 360's are warranted for five years and this was a rare example of one I actually bought at a retail store and filed the registration card.

The lady in customer service suggested I go back to the retail store for an exchange. Not possible, it's about 300 miles to Reno. How about sending it back to Nicklaus? I said I'd rather not because the shaft had been SST PUREd and this is The Magic Driver. She wasn't even too insulted when I said I didn't think they could put it back together right. So she offered to replace the head. Only one problem, she didn't do it.

Since that time, I've noticed quite a lot of comment about the Nicklaus Airmax 360 on the GEA. Lots of support. Also, lots of broken heads. One guy even said he broke three. I couldn't help but wonder if quality is a problem.

So I called again. (After all, I paid retail.) This time the customer service representative was on the ball. They knew that they had a quality problem with the 2002 head so there's a new one for 2003. The color is a little darker. I'm going to get a replacement head. Not only that, I spent enough time on hold to get a good update about the new "JNP" driver for 2003. I already bought a 420 (on eBay) and it was unimpressive. So we'll see. I'm interested to talk to someone who isn't on a short leash, but that will have to wait until next month.

Pelz Wedges: Promising, But . . .

I decided to keep the Pelz wedges, even though the 4.5 Rifle Spinner shaft flexed out to 7.0 on the Equalizer system and the swingweight on my special order topped F-1. That's why I issued my "buyer beware" warning last month. But I saw enough players hit interesting shots with them at the Palo Alto Muni. So I took them to the course.

The first day was promising. Birdie putt on one. Nice third shot to ten feet on two. Up and in from the trees on three. Up and in from over the green on six. Same on nine. Sand wedge for a birdie on ten. Lob wedge for a birdie on fifteen. And so it went. . .

Second day, not so hot. The weight began to get to me. Three or four wedge shots were ten yards long. Only one up and in and that was on eighteen. Time for a call to Dave Pelz Golf in Austin, Texas. I was thinking that the clubs were simply too far out of spec.

I've been a Dave Pelz disciple since he started writing books. Actually, probably much longer. I just found an original "Teacher" in my jewelry drawer. That's an artifact from almost thirty years ago. In any event, I thought that what I was feeling about the Pelz wedges was contrary to what he was saying in his books. The Pelz "system" calls for soft flexes and swingweights in the high D range.

Their customer service was responsive. The only problem was that what I was saying was not what they wanted to hear. They insisted that they were receiving nothing but "rave reviews". This is interesting because the most active online forum, the GEA has not had much to say about the Pelz wedges. Dave wasn't available so they referred me to Jesse Ortiz to explain how Orlimar was putting the clubs together. He wasn't available either.

So this story, like the Nicklaus sequel is going to have to continue to next month.

Leith Anderson is a partner in the Golf Lab in Palo Alto
Email to leith@calgolftech.com
Cell phone 650-743-2816.
All questions relating to equipment and clubfitting will be answered.