There is no more rewarding feeling for a golf club fitter than dialing a player into their perfect launch conditions. But getting a client dialed in is only the first step in the performance boosting process. To ensure a client brings the performance from the fitting studio to the course, we need to build them an exact copy of the club which won our fitting. Not just something that looks the same, but an actual copy. As you’re about to find out, that is not as easy as it sounds.

To replicate the performance of any golf club, we need to be able to replicate not only the make and model of the club head, shaft and grip but also the measured values for the club’s loft, lie angle, face angle, static weight, swing weight, loft sleeve setting, weight port settings, shaft length and shaft frequency.

All golf club components are mass produced and although the manufacturer do an incredible job with their tolerances these days, there are still slight variances between each identical part. While these are typically small, because there are so many of them, when combined into a finished product, they have a multiplying effect. Although it’s unlikely one slightly off spec would degrade performance in a meaningful way, when combined together, these slight variances can alter a clubs playing characteristics drastically. To keep these from compromising our final product, we need to equalize them out of our build.

To accomplish that we first need to measure the specifications of our winning club to establish our “build to” standards. If we don’t know what we are copying, how can we be successful? At Total Fit we blueprint every component in our fitting matrix and store it in our database.

Once our Club Fitters prescribe the correct head and shaft combination, the specifications in the clients build file look something like this.

Driver                                              : Awesome Club Company Killer Driver

Shaft Type                                       : Cool Shaft Company Ventoid Orange Stiff Flex

Grip Type                                        : Sweet Grips New Century Aimlock Standard

Dexterity                                         : Right Handed

Loft                                                   : 9.5 Degrees

Head Weight                                  : 206.4 grams

Shaft Weight                                  : 63.4 grams

Grip Weight                                    : 49.5 grams

Built Length                                    : 45 inches

Weight/Track Setting                    : 12G Full Draw

Adjustable Sleeve Setting             : +1

Frequency                                       : 262 cycles per minute

Measured loft                                : 10.8 degrees

Measured Lie                                 : 59.7 degrees

It’s time to build our club. After gathering the prescribed components, we need to measure each specification and compare them to the desired targets in our build file. First up is head weight. The target value is the specification we need and the measured value is the weight of the component we are using for our build.

Target                 Measured

Head Weight                                  : 206.4 G             : 201.2 G

Right away we can see that the stock head weight is 5.2 grams lighter than our fitting club. To increase the head weight, we can either swap out adjustable weights, add hotmelt or add lead tape to the clubhead. Golf club manufacturers have gotten so good that there is never more than a gram or two difference in manufacturing tolerances any more, but shaft length, weight and player performance all influence what head weight is best for each player. Once we dial in the head weight, we move on to shaft weight.

Target                 Measured

Shaft Weight                                  : 63.4 G               : 61.8

Since shaft weight is not adjustable like head weight is, we use component selection to achieve our goal. Any shaft that is found to be out of tolerance is rejected and replaced. Here at Total Fit we Use a +/- 2.5 gram tolerance for shaft weight. In this case our final build shaft is slightly lighter than the fitting shaft but it is within the 2.5 grams requirement so we can use it.

We should take note that this slightly lighter gram weight will likely result in this shaft measuring softer to flex than our fitting shaft. We’ll fix that if we need to when we get to our frequency measurement but first, let’s weigh our grip.

Target                 Measured

Grip Weight                                    : 49.5 G               : 50.2

Grip weight, like shaft weight, is not easily adjustable so we use the same selection process to find a grip which is within spec. In this case our 50.2-gram grip is great. Our build length, weight setting, and adjustable loft sleeve setting are all mimicked from our fitting club.

Target                 Measured

Built Length                                    : 45 in                  : 45

Weight/Track Setting                    : 12G Full Draw : 12G Full Draw

Sleeve Setting                                 : +1                      : +1

 

Let’s move on to the shaft frequency measurement which you may or may not be familiar with. Frequency is defined as,

: the number of repetitions of a periodic process in a unit of time: such as

a

: the number of complete alternations (see ALTERNATION sense 1) per second of an alternating current

b

: the number of complete oscillations (see OSCILLATION sense 3) per second of energy (such as sound or electromagnetic radiation) in the form of waves

 

In golf we use frequency of shafts to compare their playing characteristics. We measure this in Cycles Per Minute or CPM for short. For two identical shafts to play the same they must measure the same CPM.

Although both our shafts are identical Cool Shaft Company Ventoid Orange Stiff Flex shafts, you’ll see they’re not measuring the same CPM. Because our new shaft is only measuring 258 cycles it would play almost a half a flex softer than our fitting shaft.

Target                 Measured

CPM                                                 : 262                    : 258*

To fix this we need to tip trim our shaft. All golf shafts are designed so the diameter is largest in the handle and thinnest at the tip with the reduction distrusted along the entire length. The wider diameter of the butt section causes this area to be extremely rigid while the thinner middle and tip sections allow the shaft to bend.  If we trim off some of the most flexible part of the shaft, the tip, and increase the percentage of the more rigid butt section in our final build, we increase the stiffness and CPM.

So now we’ve achieved our 262 CPM target frequency we’re ready to move on to loft and lie.

Target                 Measured

Adjustable Sleeve Setting             : +1                      : +1

Measured loft                                : 10.8*                 : 10.2*

Measured Lie                                 : 59.7*                 : 59.2*

We set the adjustable loft sleeve setting in our build club to the identical position we had it in during the fitting, +1 degree. In spite of this you can see our measured loft is .6 degrees than our target. Good thing we measured. No shaft is ever perfectly straight and even with all precautions taken, ever perfectly centered in the hosel of the golf club. This means we can have slight variances.  To fix this we’re going to ignore the reference setting of +1 degree and set the sleeve instead to the +1.5 degree setting.  Measuring our true loft we now get,

Target                 Measured

Setting                                             : +1                      : +1.5

Measured loft                                : 10.8*                 : 10.7*

Measured Lie                                 : 59.7*                 : 59.5*

Success! Our measured loft is now almost identical despite the 2 loft sleeves being set in different positions.

You see if we had just assembled our head, shaft and grip without measuring any of our specifications we would have built a club with a different loft, different head weight, different shaft flex, different static weight and different swing weight than you were crushing during your fitting!

You can have the best fitting in the world and if the club you get is not identical to the one in the fitting, it may not give you the same performance benefits. This is why a custom build goes hand in hand with a custom fit.