I Need a Scientific Theory explanation of FCT

Okay, so if I go to the TaylorMade website, they tell me what to adjust, but they do not explain WHY any of the adjustments work.

According to all I can find on their website, their general approach to setting the adjustment for the golfer is simply:

(I'm paraphrasing)

1.   If you hit it too high, adjust the setting to "Low"

2.   If you hit too low. set it to "High"

I love that.

It's so basically intuitive and logical that even a six-year-old would sigh with exasperation if you needed to have it explained to you.

And being a golfer who craves easily understood, straightforward instructions, the utter simplicity of it makes me giddy.

Unfortunately, however, that is not  . . . .  quite . . . . . . . . . .  all there is to it.

They also indicate that adjusting the loft angle will affect the direction the ball takes.

In other words, if all other things are kept equal  (i.e.,  grip, shaft flex, swing weight, lie angle, swing speed, squareness and trajectory of clubhead through impact, etc. . . .  ), then, in general a higher loft will tend to cause the ball to fade a little.  And of course, a lower loft tends to draw the ball.

So, they've built in an automatic compensation setting to counteract this natural tendency.

Therefore, Higher loft settings are designed to close the clubface and pull the ball a little left which will theoretically exactly offset the tendency to fade, while Lower loft settings open the face for a little push right.

Okay, fine so far. But me and a couple of buddies would like to see a detailed chart that breaks down these parameters for analysis. We are college grads educated in science and have a fairly good grasp of aerodynamic forces on spinning ballistic objects that are already in the air, buzzing off to wherever they happen to be going.  The part we are having trouble with is the forces acting on the ball at impact

Does anyone know of a chart that explains FCT by showing what happens as the ball leaves the clubface?

What is it that actually happens to make the ball tend to fade when you increase loft?  And how does the ball react coming off a slightly closed (or compensated) face?

That is very disheartening. I think next time i buy a driver, i will have to have its attributes checked out by the seller.

I always wondered about loft changes, I can get the face plate from taylormade being able to change the loft because it opens and closes the clubface. But with Titleist its the same sole, so if you change the lie and face angle. The sole will ground the club the same, negating i think the face angle change, yet the lie would be different. So in actuality the best method to measure the loft on the driver for titliest is to mark a vertical line on the shaft that can be a new standard of gripping the club. This way the shaft rotation doesn't change when the club is grounded. So i think his way of measuring is not wrong based on his premise that players ground the club. I think with adjustable driver players need to find a new way to grip the club, unless you have taylormades adjustable sole plate

I appreciate the article but after reading it, I have some hesitations. The author sounds more like a disgruntled clubmaker than a scientist. It could be just the tone in which he wrote the article and my experience being in hard scientific articles, but it didn't convince me.

Well the tone of the article still doesn't refute the measurements do they? I mean if you spent 350+ dollars on an adjustable driver, you might want to know what your adjusting the numbers to accurately. Unless Titleist isn't posting true numbers because they don't measure them afterwards. Or its basically fraud because they are selling more drivers because the lofts are marked lower (closer to the tour players), yet they play a larger loft to help the amateurs out.

For me, the tone sheds doubt on the measurements. And you'd have to ask, if he's right, surely he tried to get this published. Maybe he sent it to a major golf publication. But I haven't read anything from Golf Digest or Golf.com, etc. about manufacturers fraudulently claiming lofts. You just accused one of the largest manufacturers in the golf industry of committing fraud because you read an unpublished and biased report that hasn't been reviewed by any peers in the industry. No thanks.

Well like they say, proving intent is tough to do. who knows, maybe they measure loft differently, maybe not. But when you take a measuring tool used for decades to measure loft, and it gives you 14.5, when the driver says 10.5 That isn't close. i can understand being off by half a degree, maybe a degree at most in processing. Most club makers would say your lofts are usually with in a certain range, nothing is perfect. But 4 degrees is a lot. It makes sense really, higher lofts = less spin loft to the right or left, which means a more accurate driver. Really, driver loft has nothing to do with how high a driver will go, that is golf swing and golf shaft.

Just because its not published in golfdigest or golf.com doesn't mean it is credible. Sorry, but to major news magazines don't mean shit to me, especially after the years of worthless instructions they have polluted the golfing minds with.

How can you say its biased? It may or may not be. Just because his tone is curt and to the point, doesn't mean its biased. Look at Trackman numbers, I haven't seen one article on golf digest or golf.com about trackman, does that mean there not credible. They have been in the forefront of relating data to the golf swing for the past 10 years. They basically help blow up the whole notion of ball flight laws, and how the ball relates to swing path and clubface.

There has been a number of postings were people measure there driver lofts to find them grossly higher than the stated lofts, ping does it.

When I say published, I wasn't only referring to Golf Digest and Golf.com. They were simply examples of leading golf publications. There are hundreds of academic and business journals that publish pieces like this. But they always require peer review. I'm not saying he's completely wrong. I'm just saying I'm not going to become a believer until I see multiple sources claiming the same thing.

I would have to agree, i might have been a bit overreaching :p But if it is true, i would not be happy. Honestly i would send the club back to Titleist and say send me one with the correct loft.

Though i am still not sure about his measurement of loft, i think its being changed because he's grounding the club the same way. That changes the hole dynamic right. Instead of keeping the club the same in the hands, and changing the lie and loft, he's grounding the club, and the sole plate doesn't change, so the loft will always be the same. I think his presumption on grounding the club is wrong. I think that's why Taylormade has a adjustable plate, they figured that out.

If you are so worried about the tolerance levels of the retail stamped clubs, go to a local fitter and have him measure the face.  But you should note that drivers are not uniform across the face.  Meaning - the face on most drivers today found on the market have a bulge and therefore may be 9* at one point and +x* to +/-x.xxx* on another point.  Without reading the article linked within this thread, I'm guessing that could lead to some of the discrepancy found by the author of the article?  He could simply be measuring the driver differently than the OEM.

Therefore, the fitter should take multiple measurements across the face of the club and give you those for reference.  The reason I say this is that the fitter doesn't have the work instructions for how the OEM measures the club.  I'm sure there are best practices that OEM's follow, to properly measure loft on a club, but that doesn't mean they use them, and haven't come up with their own method.

Ideally, if I were a fitter, I'd have you hit balls on Trackman with contact tape.  This would give me an idea of where you typically make impact on the face of the club... Then measure that area of the face and give you those numbers.  Then with the numbers taken off of the areas where you typically make contact, tie it back to Trackman and come up with the optimal setup to ensure your Spin Loft was within the desired range for your swing speed.  I may also have you tweak your stance a little too to get your Angle of Attack (AoA) set properly.

Using Trackman data... Under ideal launch conditions, the best place to hit the drive for optimal spin loft is here: