Offset in Golf Club Heads

[WUTiger]

I don't care what you believe or who you believe (including me) - but I'm also not the only one that thinks the claim that offset gives you extra time to square the club face is a BS. All I'm saying is use some common sense and don't just accept something as true because you found it on the internet (Google included). .....

Club designer Ralph Maltby explains offset in the following thread from his website. He says that offset

does give golfers more time to rotate the clubface back to square at impact. http://www.ralphmaltby.com/forum/topic/33 Ralph has been involved with golf club design since the 1970s, and is the founder of GolfWorks. GW makes clubs and club components, and has a number of training schools for club design, repair and fitting. The PGA and major golf store chains use his training schools.

[Weezy]

No, Gordon is right. He said his divots point left, which is out-to-in for a right, producing a fade.

Ahh you are correct, my fault, i though for sure he said he was a lefty but he indeed said his divots point left.

[NCSU_MSE]

Club designer Ralph Maltby explains offset in the following thread from his website. He says that offset

Well, this engineer is going to have to agree to disagree with Ralph. I don't see how moving the clubface back is going to change the incident angle of the clubface to the ball. Offset will certainly promote a hands-ahead-of-ball impact, but the physics and geometry of squaring the clubface are unchanged, offset or no. As one other poster stated, the primary purpose of offset is to move the club's COG back, thus promoting a higher ball flight. Any nonsense about more time to square the clubface is like arguing the speed of light to the 12th decimal point.

[NativeTxn]

Club designer Ralph Maltby explains offset in the following thread from his website. He says that offset

I am aware of who Ralph Maltby is, and I am quite familiar with his MPF Ratings. And obviously I respect the fact that he has been involved in the "golf world" FAR longer, and in a far different capacity, than I have.

That being said, not only does he state that increased offset only provides marginal help, I also have to take with a grain of salt the statement of a man whose own Playability Factor rated the TM R9 at a 97 (which from the MPF Ratings he has put out over the the last 4 or so years is the lowest rating I have seen for a club). Heck, the Nike VR TW forged club is rated at 516, and I doubt that there is anyone that would honestly argue that the Nike VR TW is easier to hit than the R9. There are plenty of other instances where his "ratings" do not exactly seem accurate. So again, I am going to respectfully disagree with Mr. Maltby, and all the others who argue that additional offset allows enough extra time to square the clubface to actually help a golfer hit straighter shots or help fix a slice. To this day, I have not seen anyone provide a cogent and well-reasoned argument to show that that is the case. . . including Mr. Maltby. It seems to me that the "extra time to square the clubface" is almost always a "second benefit" or "additional reason" argument - honestly, I have never seen it put out there by anyone as the primary and/or only reason given for having offset in the club. While it is good to have more than one benefit, from the responses I've read and seen from "experts" or directly from the club manufacturers, most of the time this argument is almost a "well, people won't really settle for just being able to get the ball up in the air easier using a club with more offset. We need to give them another reason - maybe one that will help "fix" their poor ball flight that results from poor swings." I think that NCSU_MSE hit the nail on the head. As I've said before, I think you're arguing about such a small amount of offset, and that small amount of offset does not provide enough "extra time" to make any appreciable difference when a person is swinging a golf club at 75+ MPH. The numbers simply don't add up.

[iacas]

On 6/20/2010 at 10:56 PM, WUTiger said:

Club designer Ralph Maltby explains offset in the following thread from his website. He says that offset

While I respect Ralph Maltby a great deal, let's look at some simple math.

Let's say an average golfer swings his 5-iron at 75 MPH. That's not very fast, so it's a decent comparison.

Let's give the guy a set of TaylorMade Burner SuperLaunch or Burner Plus irons, the five-iron of which has 5.7mm of offset. 75 MPH is 33,528 mm/sec. Thus, with 5.7 mm, the golfer has a whopping 170 microseconds (that's 0.00017 seconds) of "extra" time to "square the face."

How fast would the face need to be rotating in order to gain a measly one extra degree of rotation in that time? After all, 0.00017 seconds is not very long.

Note first that a blink takes 300-400 milliseconds, and we're talking about microseconds here - 0.00017 versus  0.3 seconds to blink. This means that you can swing a 5I through that 5.7mm about 1750 times while a fast blink occurs (2350 if you blink at 400 milliseconds).

So… for 1° of rotation every 0.00017 seconds, that's 5,882°/second. Consider that a PGA Tour player often rotates the clubface with his 5-iron at less than 2000°/second (and with the driver, often < 2500°/sec), and you've got a practical limit of about 1/3° change due to the offset thanks to the added 5.7mm.

And remember, too… that's the most extreme irons I could think of at the moment in terms of offset.

[B-Con]

The speed of the club

should be irrelevant. The face of the club on is open on the downswing and closed on the follow through. Through the point of impact with the ball, it is rotating from open to closed and at impact should be pointed straight were the golfer wants it to. The question simply is how many degrees the clubface will rotate during those .2 inches. (I'm using .2 inches as an example because it's between the offset of a 5 and 6 iron in my MX-19 set.) Speed shouldn't matter because the clubhead should rotation speed should change to match the swing speed. I doubt a 70 mph swinger and a 90 mph swinger rotate the clubhead about the shaft at the same rate. Let's round up and find the upper bound, namely, the maximum possible rotation that could occur, and lets us .25" of offset for buffer: Say the clubhead rotates 90* (45* open to 45* closed) between the player's feet, so over a distance of (rounding way down) 1 foot. Assuming the rotation is constant the entire time. That's 90*/foot and thus 90/(12 X 5) = 1.75* of rotation per .2 inches. 1.9* of help in squaring the clubface can definitely be a noticeable help. However, that's the maximum conceivable help, I'd guess that more realistic numbers are probably going to be around .75* since the clubface probably makes that 90* rotation over something closer to 2 foot distance and offset is closer to .2". .75* is still helpful, but it's not going to shave two strokes off my score. So, offset is probably not a big influence on squaring the club. My guess would be that one benefit is that it helps players come down behind the club if they have a tendency to hit thin, which it seems a lot of beginners do. There getting an extra .1" under the ball can mean quite a few extra yards if the ball is hit fat. [edit] Kind of what Maltby said in the link above:

The second way to look at offset is that as you increase the offset you help some golfers to better keep their hands ahead of the clubhead coming into impact. This in turn helps some golfers hit more down on the ball vs. a sweeping type swing which is more parallel to the ground.

[/edit]

I'd have to see numbers on how the COG is effected to guess whether or not it is the primary benefit, but right now I'd guess so.

[iacas]

The speed of the club

I get what you're saying, but we're basically talking about rounding errors.

Say the clubhead rotates 90* (45* open to 45* closed) between the player's feet, so over a distance of (rounding way down) 1 foot. Assuming the rotation is constant the entire time. That's 90*/foot and thus 90/(12 X 5) = 1.75* of rotation per .2 inches.

My clubface stays relatively square to the arc - which means I get around 90 degrees of clubface rotation over a span of five feet or so, not one or two feet.

[B-Con]

I get what you're saying, but we're basically talking about rounding errors.

Maybe you can rotate it faster at a stand still, but. I don't think you rotate at maximum speed for a swing, just at the necessary speed. At 3 feet before impact, I'm guessing that your face is just as open whether you're swinging at 20 MPH or 90 MPH, right? My assumption was that the angle of the clubface to the arc is dependent only on where the clubhead is in the arc. If so, then speed doesn't matter since the clubface will be at the same place at the same physical locations.

My clubface stays relatively square to the arc - which means I get around 90 degrees of clubface rotation over a span of five feet or so, not one or two feet.

I was kind of pulling that guess out of thin air, in part because I didn't want to go find several slow motion iron swings on YouTube to build an estimate.

So assuming 5 feet, that .75* gets more than halved, so the offset really can't be that useful. [edit] I must've had the page open for longer than I thought before my original post because I missed your previous post. I like your approach. If you disagree with my assumption above (the angle of the clubface relative to the arc depends only on the location of the clubhead in the swing) then yours it the only valid approach. Otherwise, both calculations show that the clubface rotation aid is negligible.

[WUTiger]

I went on Maltby's forum and asked him for a quick mechanics lesson on offset/face squaring.

[adamg]

sounds like a good myth busters episode :P

[bplewis24]

sounds like a good myth busters episode :P

I agree. Interesting subject.

Brandon