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cmarkmyers, While you are exactly right that as loft decreases, lie angle misdirection is usually not as important is very correct. However, as the popularity of hybrids has increased, I've found that they're unusually sensitive to lie angle changes despite their low loft. Why? I'm not actually sure, to be quite honest it defies physics. However, I hope to find the answer to that later this month.

asianpsuation, The Zcom series is the easiest of all shafts to decipher. Z-Com stands for "Zone of communication." The first letter in the shaft's name is the area where the shaft is most soft, it is stiff in others. I wish other companies would take Fujikura's idea and incorporate it, they even go so far as to place the bend profile in graphics on the shaft. The B zone is the stiffest overall, but its predominant bend is in the butt section, it is stiff in the tip. Great shaft for golfers with a long swing arc, smooth transition and a very late release of their wrist cock. it's a tough shaft to fit into. The M zone is only avialable as an ultra light (54g) at retail although heavier weights are available to the tour. It's stiff in the tip, and butt while being soft in the midsection. Great shaft for golfers who are inbetween, medium swing arc, medium transition, medium wrist cock release. The T zone is stiff in the butt and midsection and softer in the tip. Outstanding fairway wood shaft, it's a good fit for golfers who have a short, compact swing arc, an aggressive transition, but a semi-early wrist cock release. Very high quality shafts, but the installation is crucial due to a very long tip section. Not a shaft I would ebay or buy from any clubbuilder.

awtryau89, The Ozik TP-7X is a very advanced shaft, the big advantage of Matrix's TP series is the dynamic spin reduction obtained from their proprietary process which helps reduce side spin as well as spin overall; however, it will not cure all your directional woes (just ask Justin Rose). They feel uncharacteristically smooth for such firm shafts which is one of the advantages. The TP-7X is more of a tip stiff design which helps players who release their wrist cock very late and are looking to keep ball flight and spin rate down. Also, the wide range of flex options which is great for fitting players who are inbetween flexes. Also, remember that it weighs in at around 75g which is heavier than the shafts you are used to playing and may take some adjustment and cost some swing speed. However, there are many shafts with comparable bend profiles for a fraction of the price. Looking into shafts that are more butt stiff and tip stiff and flexible in the midsection, the Mitsubishi Rayon Diamana line is very good. As the weights get heavier, remember that tip becomes increasingly stiff, so take that into consideration. The 83S will play noticeably stiffer than the 73 or 63S. The venerable Fujikura 757 probably set the standard for tip stiff but stiff shafts, it's very comparable to the 73g Diamana, perhaps a bit stiffer and is an excellent shaft for players seeking a mid launch and lower spin. Graphite Designs new Pershing is an even more inexpensive version of the 757 that plays a bit softer and smoother overall, yet can stand up to the hardest of swings. It's an oustanding shaft and it's fast become a favorite of mine (former 757 user) especially considering its price of only $100 installed. Going the opposite direction to something that is still tip and butt stiff but stiffer feeling overall, the Grafalloy Blue is a great shaft fitting that profile. Fast tempo, very aggressive swingers and hitters often like this shaft over some of the other options. Those are just a few of the options on the market, there are plenty more, but to know for sure, I'd have to see your swing and how it fits into these bend profiles to know for sure. I don't know much about the Axiv series, I do know they're very high quality, but I have no experience with them yet.

drizz, You'll start hearing more about the release date at the end of month after the reps get out of their sales meetings.

I think that's the great thing about them, you can make them look as outrageous or tame as you want since you control the colors. The eight inch pom is a little much for me, I opted for the smaller five inch for my two clubs and I've got no regrets at all. Black sleeve with black and gold tassels, I think mine look mighty sharp.

catfell, Go see my friend Max at Custom Golf of Connecticut. Superb work, great turnaround, and fair prices. It's a bit of a drive from Manhattan (about 45 minutes without traffic), but it's well worth it in my opinion. http://www.golfpsychos.com/Index.htm

shortgame85, They're great, expensive, but the quality is very high. What you get is completely up to you in terms of color and design. They're very durable and to clean them, once a season simply include them with the next batch of clothes you take to the dry cleaner. Highly reccomended.

RX Phoenix, Find another store, I'm selling all mine for $249.99 and so is every other store I've seen them at.

RXPhoenix, The Unitized putters have the heads welded to the shaft, so in a sense it is one piece in that you can't replace the shaft, and the two are one piece, but they are not created as one piece, they are made as two and joined. Also, the putters are not forged, they are CNC milled from 303 stainless steel (a harder steel than the mild carbon in Scotty's Circa '62) and then welded to a shaft, the whole thing is then plated to cover the seam. It would simply be too wasteful to mill an entire putter out of one block of stainless steel. Justin Leonard has been playing one for a while. It's a good feeling putter and is priced reasonably well, it will be interesting to see how the market will accept it, especially with other clubs like Ping's Redwood and Mizuno's Bettinardi line priced in the same line.

Dave asked me a great question in a previous thread I thought might help everyone. http://thesandtrap.com/forum/showthr...8499#post38499 Before I go further into exactly why exactly driver face angle is often a myth, there are two principles you should understand and accept. They are easy to explain in person, but difficult purely in words. Many people feel they are counterintuitive, but they are true, so please bear with me and accept them as dogma. 1. A closed face driver actually increases effective loft at impact (assuming you keep the face square). 2. An open face driver actually decreases the effective loft at impact (assuming you square the clubface). As Dave mentioned, most companies do produce a variety of face angles because of both manufacturing tolerances and clubhead design to help amateurs for a variety of reasons. However, testing has shown that even a moderately closed clubhead (1-3 degrees) will not have an adverse effect on face angle at impact for most players . Nick Price, a player who has made a career of moving the ball both ways plays all his woods with a two degree closed clubface and has shown no adverse affects from it. The big reason why most companies perfer to use a closed clubface is because it increases the effective loft of the driver face at impact. Just about all golfers these days need more loft, but refuse to get away from their 9.5 and 8.5 degree drivers despite lower spinning driver heads and golf balls. Manufacturers have decided to be proactive and give the customers what they need without telling them. Measure the loft on most off the rack drivers these days and you might be surprised at what they truly measure. A closed face is one way to do this without actually misleading the customer. There are a select few players (who mostly use a severe rotation of the forearms at impact like Vijay Singh) who can not play closed face drivers. These players require an open faced clubface so they can freely rotate their arms through impact without fear of delofting the clubface. Dave, it's entirely possible you might fall into this category. However, what I've found most often is that better players (who often fear the left miss) see a slightly closed face and they instinctively try to compensate holding off their release, suddenly their body tells them they are out of position and they end up over compensating and hitting a low liner OB left. One example is a customer who just ordered a superquad from me. When it came in, he was so excited he took it out to the course, and called me just before closing saying he wanted to send it back because the face was closed it was going left of left. I said, "Sure, but let's check the face angle tomorrow and see what we're working with." Sure enough, when I put it on the loft lie machine it measured a half degree open. No complaints from him since. That's an extreme case, but it happens more often than you might think. With better players especially who have the memories of a thousand bad hooks, when something looks like it's going to go left, more times than not it's going left. There are also other variables involved, hand positon at address for one. Keep you hands forward of the clubhead, and it looks a little open, put your hands behind it, and it looks a bit closed. Some drivers also have soles which are conducive to being closed, the superquad is definitely one. If you take your hand placement with the club resting on the ground, it might be resting in a fashion that is a bit closed. One huge factor which few people mention is paint. Tom Wishon did experiments where he repainted the same heads (all the square face angles) in various ways. His heads with paint breaks on the hosels all appeared to lay open to the majority of golfers, paint that extended slightly onto the face in the toe gave the appearance of a closed clubface. All in all, there are many variables that relate to face angle, it's not purely a cut and dry issue, and I hope this mini-opus has given you guys a little more insight into why manufacturers make face angles the way they do. I also neglected to mention heel weighting which is for the express purpose of helping close faces on metal woods, but that is another issue for another time. I will say for all the better players out there that truly want a square face angle (in appearance and measurement), look into Bridgestone metal woods. I have yet to have a Bridgestone wood come into the shop that hasn't been square to one degree open in terms of face angle and within a half degree of the stated loft. No other OEM comes close to replicating Bridgestone's attention to detail, although others like Cleveland are beginning to follow suit.

Naruto, Please open your mind and listen to what I'm trying to tell you. It's nothing personal and I'm not pulling this stuff out of thin air. I learned about club design and fitting from the best people in the industry, and that's where all my info comes from. Golf myths are everywhere and they're flat out wrong and they feed people misinformation that does not help them. Of course, perhaps you'd care to take this up with other technical gurus such as Tom Wishon? http://www.wishongolf.com/tech_talk/...wers_page2/#42

Hackzaw, This is a great question and I am very glad you asked it. There is no ideal set of launch conditions for irons, some people are steep with high spin, others are shallow with low spin, but they all end up working some how. Even with the driver, there is no one "perfect" set of launch conditions, there are many variations that work. I was at Ping's facility in Phoenix last weekend getting some info since I've been struggling with fitting the Rapture. I was talking with the Ping employee about Bubba Watson and he mentioned that his launch angle numbers are so high (in the eighteen degree range) that any other player with ball speeds that high would be losing distance, but Bubba puts such an ascending blow that he is able to keep the spin very low and produce incredible carry yardage. This may blow your mind, but given a consistent swing, all irons launch at roughly the same trajectory no matter what their centers of gravity are. Blades have a higher center of gravity but weaker lofts so the ball gets up in the air, game improvement irons have lower centers of gravity but stronger lofts to keep the ball down a bit, and players cavities fall somewhere inbetween. There is already consistent spacing between irons in the OEM lofts. Launch Monitors are a fitting tool, nothing more. They are not the be all end all answer to fitting. Unless you are using a doppler radar system, distance measures are estimations, not measurements, so you're not obtaining a real world answer to your question. If distance gaps need to be tweaked that is easy to do with loft changes. Spin rates again are notoriously inaccurate on luanch monitors often coming in at 800-600 rpms higher than stated. Any set of irons I sell comes with the demand that the player returns after a month so we can make sure the lofts and lies are where the player wants and they have feedback where it counts - on the golf course, not in Vector's software. If someone demands to get on the launch monitor, I'm more than happy to oblige, but I'd much rather they took some demo six irons with me for a week and went to the range and course to see what they thought in the real world, not computer models.

shortgame85, There's a myriad of reasons. Shaft fitting is done easily based on swing style, and it is easy to test and demo different shafts in different heads. Things like angle of attack, path, and face contact are easy to measure with impact tape on the sole and face. Furthermore, most of the time, people come in with an idea of the club they want to purchase, it's never happened that someone walks in with the desire to purchase a Ping G5 and walks out with a set of MP-67's. Pick a category of irons that fits you, then go in and demo. There's not that much difference play and performance wise between different brands of clubs in the same category (game improvement, blade, players cavity, etc). An iron is an iron, they all pretty much work the same. Just pick the ones that fit your eye the best. With driver heads there are so many different centers of gravity, which relate to different launch angles and spin rates that people often come in looking for one brand and walk out with the complete opposite because what they wanted simply did not fit them.

Hackzaw, I agree with your clubfitter one hundred percent.

Lew, I would narrow down your choices a bit, drop all the shafts except the True Temper Dynalite Gold and Rifle 4.5. The other shafts aren't worth the time and effort. Two other shafts I would highly reccomend you look into are Nippon golf's NS950 and True Temper's M80. I think either shaft would be a great shaft for you, both are light weight, responsive, extremely high quality, but are still very easy to control.

Maverick, You're exactly right. The blocks to the right come from the compensation you're performing to counteract the steepening effects of being across the line at the top. The big thing I see is dropping the club to the inside on the way down and coming in to out on the downswing. You don't seem to be overdoing it, but over time this can lead to big problems, some of which I faced which lead me to change my swing. I think shortening your swing and working to keep the club from getting across the line will help shallow you out and prevent you from needing to compensate on the downswing.

Maverick, What are your typical misses? I will say that your balance and tempo are excellent, you obviously liked the result of that shot, and it sounded like a very solid impact. The big thing I see (and something I struggle with as well) is the position of the club at the top of the swing, you are close to being shut, and very across the line. Try to keep the club pointed right down the target line, or even a little left of it at the top. One great way my instructor got me to capture that sensation was feeling like my right palm was pointed at the target at the top of my swing.

Shigeki, I'm a little late to the party, but I just checked in on this thread, and must agree with you that the R7 forged is an absolutely incredible iron. One of my customers bought a set as a backup for trips, and I'm currently in heavy negotiations with him to get them in my possession. They are a forged players cavity back iron with a consistent cavity much like an updated version of the venerable TaylorMade 300's. They have a small blade size and very thin top line. They feel exceptionally solid at impact, look absolutely perfect at address, and perform exceptionally well. They're semi-difficult to find, but I've got to say, these irons blow away anything TaylorMade has out in the US now.

Naruto, Much like closed driver faces, iron offset is one of the great myths of golf. Offset in a club is not there to turn shots right to left, its main purpose is helping position weight further back behind the ball and raise ball flight. True the presence of offset does allow for an extra split second for a player to close the clubface, but the time is so minuscule that it's effectively negligible. Even a super game improvement club like the Ping G5 or Nike Slingshot OSS with half shaft offset isn't enough to turn a one yard draw into a thirty yard hook. What is likely happening in this case is the golfer is holding the clubface "toe in." If you hold the clubface perpendicular to the target line like you are supposed to, the club will go the same direction as a zero offset blade. Besides there are plenty of minimal offset cavity backs which offer the looks and feel of a muscle back with added forgiveness.

No imposition at all. Whichever length you feel most comfortable with, I would suggest you stick with that throughout your set. It sounds like 1/8" under is your preferred length, so I would stick with that. So your 5 iron would be 37.75" and the six iron would be 37.25". That will also make things easier when it comes to weighting. Variable length sets make consistent setup more difficult, and will also lead to variability in shaft flex throughout the set. Also, even though loft is the number one factor in distance you will hit a club, shaft length also plays a role. I would not suggest using Tungsten powder, I'm a much bigger fan of hosel weights. They're much cleaner and easier to work with, especially if you decide to reshaft later. Also, with playing your clubs 1/8" under, you may not need to tip weight at all since you're only losing 3/4 of a swingweight point. Definitely play what you feel comfortable with, and it sounds like dynamic gold is a good fit with you. I've never seen you swing, so giving shaft advice was overstepping my bounds a bit. A softstepped S300 will be more accurate than the R300 hardstepped, but you will need to be able to load it consistently. Rifles might be a good idea to try as well, they're consistently easier to load, lighter so you will be able to swing them a bit faster, and their softer tips help increase launch angle and carry distances, especially with the long irons. Keep experimenting and find what fits your game best. Good luck, let me know if you have any more questions at all.

Lumpy_22, It is actually the opposite. The longer the shaft is, the lighter the head is. Board favorite Scotty Cameron uses the following formula for his standard lengths: 33" - 350g 34" - 340g 35" - 330g All puttermakers use that formula, because as a shaft gets longer swing weight increases, and maintaining the same swing is impossible with increasing the headweight.

Cmarkmeyers, These are excellent questions. Shorter than "stock" irons are a great benefit to many golfers. With a shorter club, you're much more likely to hit the center of the face and be able to make solid contact. Usually with most of my customers whose irons I shorten, they increase distance because they are able to make more consistent and solid contact. I would strongly recommend you stick with making your irons a half inch shorter gripped, so you the final length of your five iron would be 37.5". However, do not forget that the cap of the grip adds a quarter inch to the overall length, so the finished length of the iron should be 37.25" before gripping. You will also need to use a six gram tip weight in each club to get the swingweight back to standard, otherwise the swing weight will be extremely light, and could wreak havoc on your swing, especially if you are a tempo and timing player. Ideally, each "step" is roughly 1/3 of a flex for Dynamic Gold. So, three "steps" should equal a flex. However, I would not suggest ever hard or softstepping more than twice. For a smooth swinger, I would suggest taking the R300 and hardstepping it, that way you will not feel like you are struggling to load the shaft. Remember you are not changing the dynamic flex of the shaft, you are only changing its feel. Are you sure Dynamic Gold is the best fit for you? Typically Dynamic Gold fits best with an fast swinger who has a smooth transition, and a late release of their wrist cock. That's a difficult bend profile to fit into (especially in the long irons), even for the best players in the world (part of the reason why Project X is gaining such a foothold among the world's best). Let me know if you have any more questions at all, I'll do my best to try and give you the best answer.

JohnBoy, There are no industry standards for either flex or torque. One companies S flex shaft with a 2.3 torque rating could be equal to anothers X flex with a 1.8 torque. Things like flex, and torque serve only as general guidelines in the fitting process. The key to shaft selection is knowing the bend profile of various shafts (where they flex and are stiff), which bend profiles fit different swings, and applying all that knowledge to suit a customer's swing to a tee. I've said it countless times to customers, and I'd like re-emphasize it here: If all other aspects of a shaft fit you, the torque will as well!

ipark1303, Torque is a measure of a shaft's resistance to twisting. Many golfers confuse this term with a shaft's accuracy or bend point as you have mentioned above. However, the two are unrelated. There are shafts that are low torque and low kickpoint such as the Accra SC-75, and there are shafts that are higher torque and higher kickpoint such as the Graphite Designs Pershing. Do not look for torque as the end all be all of fitting, there are no industry standards for measuring torque, so one companies 2.3 could be another's 4.5. In the end, if all other shaft's characteristics suit you, the torque will as well. As a general guideline though, lower torque shafts tend to feel boardier, while higher torque shafts feel a bit smoother.

ipark1303, Accuflex, Matrix, Harrison, Graphite Designs, Fujikura, Mitsubishi Rayon, UST (including Accra and Harmon subbrands), Royal Precision, True Temper (including Grafalloy), and Aldila all make equally great products. The key is finding the one that fits your swing, game, and budget.