ShopTalk: Inexpensive stepless steel shafts

[Bernie Baymiller]

Some chaff for the wind, since it sems to be slow around here lately...   Lately, several suppliers have been selling inexpensive stepless steel shafts. Elta (Golfsource USA) has the Supreme Gold and Tour Golf has the Tour Series Stepless Steel, both of which I've tried on my irons. The Supreme Golds ($5) seemed pretty good...the two sets I bought were all were within 3 grams and a little lighter than Rifles...maybe 114 grams for a 39" shaft. They played well. But were they as good as they seemed?   Since I built those sets, I have begun using my Neufinder 2 to sort the shafts by deflection, choose a base shaft and match the other shafts to it by deflection. I generally use the softest NBP in the longest iron and stiffest NBP in the shortest iron. (Although Dan wants me to try it the other way around.) The other day, I tried Tour Golf's Stepless Steel and, again, they were pretty much within specs for weight.  But WOW, some of them seemed way off in the NBP and spine magnitude when I sorted them on my NF2. The normal NBP deflection for an R-flex shaft on a 35" beam length appears to be 0.545"-0.549"...at least 5 of the 8 shafts fell within that range. Spine deflections on the 5 normal shafts were between 0.552" and 0.555"...seemed pretty good. But of the three outliers, two NBPs were 0.512" and 0.517" and the third was 0.558". If 0.004" equates to about 1 cpm (I'm no mathematician...I was given that number and hope I'm using it appropriately.), two were off by at least 6-8 cpm and the other by more than 2 cpm. Not so good. You couldn't use the manufacturer's recommended tip trim and come anywhere near a matched set with these unless you got lucky. And, you'd even have a hard time with a frequency analyzer, unless you took your cpm readings directly on the NBP and spine.   Just thought it was interesting that shafts that look OK by weight can have an almost unmatchable spine magnitude.   Bernie Writeto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]