Fitting new grips to older tapered butt shafts

[thegella]

Hi I am new on here but have a question for the wise on here and hope you can enlighten me.

I have some older Mizuno T-zoid irons I just keep going back to, they were a gap between the pro and pro 11 model irons and were only released in Japan and have have KV-PLUS graphite shafts. The grips are shot so I have removed them ready to replace them and I find the butt section is tapered. I have no accurate calliper but going off what I have the very end is about the .580 standard and then it tapers down.

Fitting any grip with standard strip of 2 inch grip tape leaves the bottom of the grip loose and a very unsatisfactory install.

Do these require a special grip or a special technique to install new grips.

Any advice will be much appreciated.

[boogielicious]

Welcome to the forum @thegella .  Could you post a photo of the shaft?  Also, which grips are you trying to install.  Most grips I find at stores have a .600 core.  Some manufacturers make .580 versions too.  This might help tighten the lower end.

Lastly.  You could contact your grip manufacturer and they may know what to do.

[thegella]

Hi boogielicious and thank you for the welcome. No I don't have a picture but I could sort one out but it would be hard to see it. Its not a huge taper, from the butt end .580 to the bottom of the grip part tapers about 1/16 if an inch or a little more. When a 600 grip is installed its very noticeable, with a .580 grip its still noticeable. If I build up tape then it will perhaps widen the grip at the top to accommodate the bottom fitting correctly and maybe that's what I should do I don't know, I just want to do the job right.

These days I think most if not all club shafts have a parallel butt section and like you say most are .600 the modern standard but some are .580 and .580 was the older standard. These Mizuno have a taper butt section so unless I spend ages trying to build up tape varying thickness all the way up the butt section then a standard grip will either be not uniformly tapered or will be loose. Its a bit of a pain and I am sure there must be a simpler solution. I just thought it must be fairly common and people would have come across this issue before but searching reveals nothing and so I thought I would ask on here.

[boogielicious]

Hi boogielicious and thank you for the welcome. No I don't have a picture but I could sort one out but it would be hard to see it. Its not a huge taper, from the butt end .580 to the bottom of the grip part tapers about 1/16 if an inch or a little more. When a 600 grip is installed its very noticeable, with a .580 grip its still noticeable. If I build up tape then it will perhaps widen the grip at the top to accommodate the bottom fitting correctly and maybe that's what I should do I don't know, I just want to do the job right.

These days I think most if not all club shafts have a parallel butt section and like you say most are .600 the modern standard but some are .580 and .580 was the older standard. These Mizuno have a taper butt section so unless I spend ages trying to build up tape varying thickness all the way up the butt section then a standard grip will either be not uniformly tapered or will be loose. Its a bit of a pain and I am sure there must be a simpler solution. I just thought it must be fairly common and people would have come across this issue before but searching reveals nothing and so I thought I would ask on here.

I'm not at home at the moment, but I do have some shafts that don't have grips on them. I will measure the taper in the grips sections to see.  I recall that my Titleist stock shafts (Diamana) for my woods had a taper at the top end.

[thegella]

The only thing I can find on the web is a winn installation guide, it details fitting a grip designed to be fitted to a parallel shaft on a tapered shaft by building up tape from the bottom to bring the tapered shaft up to a sort of parallel base for the grip between a max and min diameter and perhaps I should do the same fitting a .600 grip and build up tape in say 5 or 6 steps from the bottom. Here is the url of the guide which may help people understand my problem. http://www.winngrips.com/files/iGrip_installation.pdf

[thegella]

Though mine is not stepped as in this guide its a constant taper but the principle might work the same I will just need to work out how many layers of tape are needed at the bottom of the grip to bring it up to .600 and how many layers at the top I can have as a maximum and then build them up as in the guide. Or perhaps I can also do this with the .580 size grips I have seen