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Golf Equipment Chronicles 2008 (Part 7)

Maxed Out Custom Clubs

by Leith Anderson

This is our seventh September at the Golf Lab. After an intense spring and summer season when there’s little time to do more than answer the phone and finish the orders – fall is a little more laid back. There is time to do some follow up on projects that got sidetracked during the high season. In some ways, fall is even more exciting because we cherish the time and opportunity to make plans and improve our state of the art in clubfitting. We’ve made several new additions and improvements to the shop and our methods. The ultimate goal is to create golf clubs that help improve a player’s game.

My title this month pays homage to Mitch Voges at Max Out Golf Labs in L.A. Mitch is one of the true pioneers of custom fitting and we owe a lot of our success to methods and gizmos developed at Max Out. If you’re in L.A. you can find Mitch up on Ventura Boulevard in Thousand Oaks.

The winners and losers from 2008 are pretty much determined. That deserves a rehash – but I’ll save it for later. There are some exciting new trends that are going to come to fruition in the next year or so. I’m still enthusiastic about the emerging science of counter weighting. We’ve got some results from the “Donate Your Swing to Science” program. If you’ve missed the Golf Equipment Chronicles until now – have a look at the archives on www.calgolftech.com. Over seventy articles originally published in Golf Today Magazine and dozens of monthly newsletters are archived there.

Many Golf Equipment Chronicles readers are custom clubmakers in their own right. Most don’t have full time to devote to the craft – and aren’t quite crazy enough to equip a shop with all of the latest gizmos. Nevertheless, each month several clubmakers stop by the Golf Lab and receive a warm welcome and shop tour. We’re always ready to answer questions relating to fitting and building golf clubs. We’re making changes that will help us build even better golf clubs in 2009. The trend in custom golf is clearly to more intricately fitted and personalized clubs. The options for custom clubs – perfectly fitted to your game and taste – will explode in 2009. As usual, I have some suggestions about companies and products that deserve your attention.

If you plan to stop by, call ahead. We’ll be sure to set some time aside to show you around. We are happy to share our knowledge and experience.

By fall, the competitive season is winding down in California and golfers have the time and inclination to have a look at what’s coming down the pike for next year. For players, there’s time to do some testing to see if bag changes will be warranted for 2009. Think about taking some time to check out the products you might have missed this year as well as some of the new ideas that are causing a buzz on the Internet. But hold the good news for a brief rant on the state of the industry.

Small Business Threatened with Bloody Murder

There’s chaos in Club Land. The economics of running an independent business are driving most small, independent retail golf shops out of business. One of our independent reps who has covered the northern California territory for fifteen years stopped by in the middle of August. He thinks that all of his independent retail golf stores will be out of business within a year – victims of eBay and the predatory distribution schemes of their own suppliers. (We hope that the Golf Lab might escape that fate by concentrating on delivering services and eschewing inventory.) When prices collapse, profits disappear. When profits disappear . . .

Even the big guys are not immune. A week doesn’t go buy without financial analysts predicting golf industry “consolidation” (a euphemism for bankruptcy) in the “big box” distribution channel. After all, how many years can Golfsmith lose tens of millions of dollars in operations and still hope to make it up in volume? I will continue to beg Chronicles readers to find a way to support the smaller manufacturers – for the good of the industry. Think of how boring your life would be if the only companies making golf clubs were Callaway, Titleist, Nike, Taylor Made and Ping.

The Professional Clubmakers’ Society (PCS) Closes Its Doors

For almost twenty years, independent clubmakers have had an independent trade organization to help them polish their skills and establish their credibility. The Professional Clubmakers’ Society was founded in the 1980’s in Louisville, the dream of Elmore Just and a few compatriots. Just, in those days was the King of Persimmon. That might have been a foreboding of what was to come.

The PCS grew to almost 1500 members in the heyday of custom clubs – when custom meant “cheaper”, “knock-off” and “clone”. Fifteen years ago, name brand golf clubs were expensive so low price was a powerful incentive. Most golf clubs were still made in the USA. Then China opened up. Production surged and prices came down. “Tiger Mania” fueled a boom in the 90’s only to be followed by a bust in 2001.

Today, there is no “custom” golf club business that lets a clubmaker compete on price. The wholesale price of the parts that a clubmaker needs to buy exceeds the retail price of name brand sets at the end of the season. Pay a visit to your nearest “big box” and admire the new drivers that are going begging at $199 retail. Keep in mind that a good custom titanium head costs $125 and a nice shaft costs $50 at WHOLESALE. When wholesale cost is the same as the retail price you know that the business is sick.

Custom drivers need to sell for at least $399 to make an adequate profit for the clubmaker.

Today, custom clubmakers that prosper do so by providing expert fitting and workshop skills that match custom clubs to the fitting. An array of truly custom components including “Tour Van” limited production models is becoming available. Custom grinding and finishing that allow all golfers to receive the choices as Tour players. Custom no longer means “cheaper”. “Tour Grade” is becoming available to everyday golfers.

So what happened to the PCS? Membership eroded as the business model changed. At the bitter end, when a new regime was begging for members to renew for another year, 1250 of the 1500 members had disappeared.

But Hope Springs Eternal

The custom clubmaking business might get smaller, but it definitely won’t go away. Too many dedicated professionals are intent on trying to survive and hopefully even make a living doing a job that they love. The payback is helping a youngster win a tournament and maybe earn a scholarship. When a customer comes back to the shop to tell a clubmaker about his career round – before going home to tell his own wife –we get Goosebumps. That makes the financial sacrifice worthwhile.

A couple of years ago it became obvious that the PCS was on a slippery slope and it was raining hard. In response to the crisis, Roy Nix founded a new organization for clubmakers and recruited a couple of super stars of the craft – notably Dana Upshaw – the all-time sweepstakes winner for clubmaker honors. Roy’s vision was to help a small group of clubmakers share their knowledge and experience and hone their business skills. The original focus was on helping the full-time guys that were trying to make a living – or at least part of a living – from their business.

The Association of Golf Clubfitting Professionals (ACCP) is a private organization, owned by Roy Nix. The private, for profit nature is likely to contribute to the eventual success of the organization. Paying dues will continue as long as Roy delivers the value. It’s arguable that the PCS collapsed from the weight of its own management. In the end, there were eight Directors each wielding enough power to stop the decision making process. When democracy fails, the next step is a benevolent dictatorship. If you’re interested in custom club fitting and club making and you wonder what comes next after the demise of the PCS, go to www.agcpgolf.com and have a look around.

New organizations hoping to take the place of the PCS are blooming like flowers in the spring. A small group of PCS survivors – a band of like-minded dreamers who would rather the “next PCS” be independent and not for profit – are attempting to form such a group. The “International Clubmakers’ Guild” (ICG) www.clubmakersguild.com is the budding fruit of their labor. The future of the nascent Guild is perilous. The prospects were diminished when one of the luminaries of the custom golf industry, Tom Wishon, publicly urged unification of the two efforts to avoid diluting the impact, financing and results. As you might expect, the call for a peace treaty was immediately rejected.

Not to be outdone, there’s another group of PCS survivors in Europe who are also trying to fill the void of the PCS. The group nominated a North American leader from former PCS ranks and chose the name Professional Clubfitters’ Society (PCS) which allows them to adopt the same initials as the defunct organization as well as mimicking the look and feel. It remains to be seen if they will gain a foothold in a strange continent. If you want more information, go to www.proclubfitters.com.

My take? I joined the AGCP. I’m looking forward to the “Roundtable” meeting that has been held in November for the last three years. Several well-known clubfitters and clubmakers have signed up to deliver presentations. I think that the organization that attracts the most distinguished group of members will be the one that survives. Roy Nix got a head start in that race. Chronicles readers will get a full report in December.

A good way to help the AGCP make its way to healthy growth would be for Chronicles readers outside of the San Francisco Bay Area to go to the AGCP website and contact one of the members to do some work. The website does a good job of listing qualifications so you know the skill and experience level of the guy you’re calling. If any one of these clubmaker support organizations begins to generate sales leads, membership will grow. Sales referrals are the holy grail of any industry organization.

Update on Counterweighting

I’m going to keep hammering on the benefits of counter weighting. It is simple, cheap and it works for most golfers. During August, we spent six days, working with volunteers to test counterweights in irons and drivers. There was no charge to the participant. We worked with all levels of players, from near beginners to scratch tournament players. This was not meant to be a scientifically correct research study. We’ll leave that to a company with the funds to do that job right. We wanted to find out the most likely outcome for players of all ability levels. We will continue to collect data and one day, if volunteers show up to crunch the numbers, we might publish the results. That day is down the road. Meantime, here’s a summary of what we found out.

Our primary tool for analysis was our Achiever launch monitor. The Achiever is a great machine for comparing the performance of two clubs. In addition to the basics of ball speed and launch angle, it tracks swing path, face angle at impact and center contact. We use those metrics as indicators of improved consistency.

Most players show an increase in ball speed from 2-4 MPH. That translates into five to ten yards of additional carry distance on the golf course. In the big picture, that’s not a lot. If you were trying to see that difference on the driving range, you would have a hard time doing so. Even on the golf course, it takes a while for a small distance improvement to show up.

Far more meaningful is the improvement in consistency. Time and again, we saw improvements in swing path and face angle at impact. For some players, consistency showed up in improved center club face contact. It was not unusual for a player who hit the ball all over the club face without counterweights to hit an entire series dead center with counterweights. It may be that the reason for increased ball speed is merely better ball contact. Here’s why that might be.

The players who were helped the least by counterweights were low-index tournament players. Out of almost fifty players that we tested, four or five showed no improvement or very limited improvement. Those were players who had very good swings going into the test. For the very good players whose numbers did not show significant improvement, we recommended a trial at the range and on the course. All but one came back with reports of better ball control: more fairways hit, more consistent trajectory or better ball flight. Only one out of fifty players saw no benefit whatsoever.

It also happened that a good player might have liked the feel in his driver or irons, but not both. Bottom line: for low index amateurs, the primary benefit was feel – more solid – and ball flight – more penetrating – usually lower – with a little less visible spin.

The players who were helped the most by counter weighting were seniors and younger female tournament players. The common denominator seems to be that the counter weights are effective for players who don’t have a lot of strength.

Another class of players that got a lot of help from counterweights was the mid to high handicappers. These are players who tend to have inconsistent swing paths. Inside out and outside in swings frequently alternate, making consistency suspect and predictability impossible. It was not unusual to see players stabilize their swing paths while at the same time improving their center contact. These were the players who also got the greatest increases in average distance.

Since we’re about a month into the testing program, we’re starting to get reports back from players on the course. Two girls won tournaments with lifetime best scores. Several Muni players stopped by the Golf Lab to report they had just recorded their lowest score of the year. Several called and emailed to say that they’re hitting more fairways, keeping the ball in play better and expect their handicaps to go down.

If you’re planning on doing your own experimentation with counterweights, you might be interested to know the actual weights that produced results. As mentioned, all of our conclusions were supported by Achiever launch monitor testing data. We used the Tour Lock weights for irons because they were the most economical. The most effective weight in irons was split between eight and twelve grams. Eight grams in an iron is just barely enough to feel. Some players, particularly the higher index players, seemed to do better with heavier weights. Sixteen and twenty gram weights were good for those players. Only one player tested the best with a thirty gram weight. From what I have read on the Internet from clubmakers experimenting with counterweights, I think that there is a tendency to go too heavy.

For woods, we used the Balance-Certified Stabilizer system. The Stabilizer comes in two weights, the lighter at thirty grams and the heavier at sixty grams. By far, the most effective weight was the 30 gram. The breakdown was about eighty percent lighter. But the surprises were indeed surprising. For some of the girls, the heavier weight was indeed more effective. Emily Childs, a low index tournament player who got no benefit from weights in her irons, got a very nice increase in distance and improved consistency with the heavier weight in her driver. It seems like a good rule of thumb is to choose a weight that you don’t feel all of the time. Personally, I like the 8 gram weights in my irons.

The next question is “do you use the same weight in all clubs?” We tested several of the stronger players, who could hit a lot of shots, with different weights in their long and short irons. In a limited, but representative sample, the lighter weights seemed to perform better in the long irons and heavier weights in the short irons. That seems to be the intuitively obvious conclusion until you consider that the lightest weight in the driver is 30 grams. I remember that several years ago, when the only options for counter weights were the more expensive Balance-Certified weights, my trial and error experimentation ended up with heavier weights in the long irons and lighter weights in the short irons. That is probably nitpicking. As a default, I would be happy with eight grams in all of my irons and the 30 gram stabilizer in my driver.

Why is Golf Not Like Skiing?

There was a time quite a few years ago when I wasn’t as afraid of physical injury as I am now. As much as I love golf, there were days when I thought that skiing was the most exhilarating sport in the world. Travel to the top of the mountain and your reward is a view of a hundred miles. You see more back country in a day than you can cover in a month of hiking.

Think about how skiers choose their high performance skis. They would never walk into a ski store and ask a clerk to take the Rossignols down off the wall and fit them with bindings. Any skier who is thinking about buying new skis will surely pay a visit to the high performance ski rental store and try out the two or three models that he’s been reading about.

For some reason, golfers seem to be content with walking into a store and buying a set of clubs off of the wall as long as the “feel” and “look” right. Even ordering custom clubs from a major company involves uncertainty. You never know exactly what you’re getting until you’re on the course with your new clubs.

It seems to me that golfers should want the same choices that skiers have. If you’re thinking about two or three options – different shafts and different heads – why would you not want to play with a similar set before you make your decision?

In the Bay Area, there’s a tennis shop that offers a month of access to demo racquets, two at a time, for a fee. Half of the fee is deductible against a purchase. I would be interested to hear from Chronicles readers who would support such a service for golf clubs. “Try before you buy.” It makes sense to me.

The End of Frequency to Fit for Flex

We’ve been at the forefront of club fitting for over seven years. In that time, there have been some big changes in the way golfers understand their clubs – and select the clubs that they choose to play. There’s also been a massive change in the way clubmakers fit and build golf clubs.

Seven years ago, the concept of aligning a shaft in a club to make it more consistent in performance and feel was ridiculed by most clubmakers. Today, led by the acceptance of SST PURE ™, shaft alignment is a common practice. Since 1974, interpreting the flex of a golf club by measuring the frequency (counting the cycles per minute with a meter) and matching frequency with swingspeed has been the way golf clubs have been fit for flex. Today, fitting for flex by frequency alone is going the way of the dodo bird.

The reason is that we now understand a lot more about shafts and swings and how to match them up. The way a shaft performs along its entire length can be matched with testing knowledge of how the shaft behaves when the player swings the club to fine tune a shaft fit.

The Max Out Golf Labs Shaft Max is at the forefront of electronic devices that detect what happens to a shaft during the swing. Some clubmakers are experimenting with high speed video to capture release time and match that with the overall bend profile of a shaft. Most commercially available shafts have been frequency tested at set intervals along their entire length and the results graphed. There are commercially available “zone profile” databases that allow shafts to be compared based on their zone frequency readings. A major presentation at the ACGP Roundtable in November will be delivered by Jerry Hoefling, a former PCS member who pioneered the concept of “zone profiling” and timing the release for shaft fitting.

But there are other ways of measuring shafts. Zone profiling by frequency is a process executed by hand and by eye. It is tedious and not particularly consistent. Another way to test shafts is by measuring the “load” that a shaft exerts with electronics. The electronic device that does the best job of that is the Matrix Composite Multi Match machine. It is the same machine that Matrix uses in their factory to test and align their popular OZIK shafts before applying the graphics. We have acquired two of the Matrix machines for the Golf Lab.

In a quest for total consistency in clubmaking, we’re adding another step to our hand building process. We’re still going to use frequency matching, but as a first step we’re going to use the Matrix machines to align each shaft in the same plane before setting frequency. One of the causes of inaccurate frequency matching is setting frequency in a random plane. Since all golf shafts are inconsistent, it is not uncommon for a shaft that has been trimmed to a “perfect” frequency to be half a flex different if it is rotated a few degrees. I think that, sooner or later, meticulous clubmakers are going to agree that pretesting shafts and determining frequency in a stable plane is required for optimal results.

As clubmakers gain more experience with fitting a swing by timing release and measuring load – and matching those fitting parameters to in-depth knowledge of shaft behavior – shaft fitting will become much more of a predictable science than a matter of luck.

But there will always be an element of art and luck. After all I know about testing and fitting shafts “by the book” – my current gamers are a set of Nippon “X” flex 950’s that are “too stiff”. In the end, the more personal testing you do, the more you know. If you’re looking for the true “magic clubs” you have to be willing to try clubs that are not a good technical match. After all, you’re looking for “magic” – you should expect to find it in an unlikely place.

Custom Grinding

One of the small custom companies that made its mark is Scratch Golf. Scratch pioneered the concept of fitting the sole grind of wedges to a player’s swing. They have a comprehensive line of custom wedges and have devised a fitting program that matches a player’s swing to a particular sole grind. That’s a good start. To finish the job you still have to take a bag full of wedges to a place where you can hit a few hundred shots off of a grass surface. Then you’ll know for sure the wedge that fits your swing move – precisely.

Scratch is introducing a new line of wedge blanks that they are providing to a few shops – shops that are willing to invest in the right professional grinding and polishing equipment – and stand training at the feet of Scratch’s master grinder, Jeff McCoy.

As one of Scratch Golf’s first supporters in the Bay Area, we have purchased our industrial strength grinders and we’re working on our technique. It’s going to take a little time, especially the hand stamping of lofts, initials and decorations – but it’s going to be worth it.

I’m thinking that the day will come when golfers realize that the “Search for the Magic Wedge” is just as important as the “Search for the Magic Driver”. I plan on grinding a few dozen wedges for myself and testing them with every shaft under the sun.

Stay tuned. This will be an important experiment.

Keeping Clubs Together

Even since Chris DiMarco had the head of his driver come loose on the ninth hole of the masters three years ago, we have been looking for a replacement for the “Tour Van” epoxy that we’ve been using. We love the idea that you can build golf clubs and hit them a few minutes later, but there is a failure rate. It may be a small failure rate, but it’s disappointing when golf clubs come apart.

Our friends at Max Out sent us a new gizmo. It’s a powerful microwave generator that allows us to cure 24 hour epoxy in a few seconds. It’s new and expensive but it should eliminate the possibility of clubs coming apart. Isn’t technology wonderful?

Fun with Classic Clubs

If you haven’t been to the Golf Lab recently, you’ll enjoy our new layout. A big piece of our collection of classic forged irons is now on display. If you want a little walk down memory lane – you can see every good classic iron model that ever existed – most in mint condition. We also have a good selection of prototypes and one of a kind models. Think about building out a set of “playable classics” with modern shafts to fit your game. You’ll have a lot of fun showing that set off on Sunday afternoon at the club.

Next month we’ll have a review of the Las Vegas PGA Show and a comprehensive review of winners and losers from 2008 and best bets for 2009. Stay tuned.

Leith Anderson is a Partner in the Golf Lab, Palo Alto, CA.
He will answer any and all questions about club fitting and club making. Contact: Leith@calgolftech.com. Or by phone (650) 493-1770