Iron Shafts

Since I retired, I needed even more to fill my thirst for knowledge, I always had some interest in golf clubs and their components, but much of the information one has been getting has been on Drivers and to a lesser degree (Maybe the best modern club is the 3-wood, after all) other play clubs. Play Clubs as I like to call them is Driver, numbered "woods", and hybrids.

Iron shafts have changed dramatically, especially in the last five years.  If your irons are five years old or more, at least go to a demo day for your favorite clubmaker and try some shafts. The flex patterns in graphite are now being reproduced in steel and co-material shafts. I recently finally settled on a lightweight steel shaft.  I didn't do enough testing outdoors as well as on a machine indoors and picked a flex pattern which was almost polar to what I needed on one partial set of clubs I purchased last year. I in my testing had one of these co-material shafts (Aerotech) made and tested it in two of my own heads. I compared that, since it was so new to me to almost every other shaft I have ever played (KBS, TT, Rifle, Apex, etc.). I'm going to add information gradually and then re-publish this set of thoughts in serie.

One thing that was very exciting to extrapolate from is the MIYAZAKI series of shafts offered in Srixon Drivers.  There are four parts of the shaft that flex and in the best shafts flex rather differently from each other. On a 9 point scale  you rarely see over 7 (Just like you don't see Rifle 7.0, 6.5 is pretty stout), you will see shaft flexes like 3355, or 5566.  The flexes are for the butt, upper mid, lower mid and Tip stiffness. Soft Butt Tip Stiff is rather different from a Stiff Butt, Soft Tip - where the former will low launch and the latter high launch - usually with accompanying spin rates. These numbers can be varied in all four regions to give the best players virtually exactly what they are looking for.

Nippon Shafts eventually won for me with the Modus 3 105 g Stiff model, apparently the best mix of all worlds with a lighter weight to maximize clubhead and ball speed without the vagaries of any graphite in the shaft. In my experiments, along with polling some very good players with higher speeds that I can generate, I found that the co-materials didn't quite get there, although in the end my wife's UST Recoil irons shafts are really tasty stuff

A Call for the Bag-Carrier

#Shaming is not #Hating

Let's have more bag carriers.

Maybe 'Course Escorts" or "Ego-Strokers"

but don't call them caddies

Bandon Caddies re-stated:

"Our caddies are some of the most experienced in the industry. Our mission is to *enhance your experience* and we have found that our caddies *improve the flow of the game* for you and your friends when carrying two bags."

This is utter BS, it maybe helps the resort control pace of play, but carrying two bags is not caddying, it is Bag Carrying. 'Caddies' intrude enough on your experience DB, they cannot truly caddie, they herd you. What it does is devalue you the player. Bandon with such hubris calls themselves Golf as it was meant to be.

Caddies were always singles when I first started going there with just one kidney. A caddie is really only necessary until you get some idea about the course you are playing. True professional caddies carrying two doubles their pay and eases their output. I see stories on Team Titleist where people say "The caddie saved me 7-10 strokes?" What kind of a hack is that? That caddie is a Babysitter.

A caddie is not someone you hire for one day, it is someone you develop a relationship, a partnership with. You can have a caddie at your club that has a program. You can develop a deep relationship and I'm proud to say that teaching a young person to caddie is a treat. Only problem is those you train properly stand so far out from the rest of the bag carriers, that you start to notice that the caddie you want is unavailable.

Let's get the bag carriers to work.