Re: ShopTalk: shaft flex v.s. frequency

[John Kaufman]

Hi Bernie, et al   I've been off line for a few days. Installed a new CD rom drive and really screwed up my pc. I finally resorted to using my wife's.   I see my name all over a bunch of recent postings so I thought I'd respond to a few of the comments. Finding the weak plane of a shaft, which I prefer to put in the 9:00/3:00 plane is really pretty quick and easy. I just stick a shaft in my Club Scout clamp and check the frequency. I then loosen the clamp and rotate the shaft a few degrees. If the frequency goes up I'm moving in the wrong direction so I immediately rotate the shaft in the other direction. I keep doing this until I get FLO in the minimum stiffness (frequency) plane. I don't tweak it forever to get it down to 1 degree alignment. This is the old process of measuring with a micrometer and cutting with an axe. Remember the head can only be glued on within a few degrees and everybody's swing is in adifferent plane to begin with so this idea of aligning within a nat's ass is a bit over the top for me. I took a pretty crummy shaft a few minutes ago and found the plane I was looking for in 15 seconds. It's not a big deal.   We talk a lot about type 1 shafts, I prefer to just call them bent. What I'd like to hear about is some testing that indicates aligning an otherwise very uniform stiffness shaft that is simply bent ( generally all steel shafts) has any effect on the clubs performance. I know of three sets of tests that indicated no effect on performance from alignment of a type 1 shaft but I've not seen any data on tests that indicate alignment did improve performance.   I'm sure we could align variable stiffness shafts that provided optimum performance for any given golfer but I'm sure this would be in violation of the rules.   Merry Christmas and a Healthy and Prosperous New Year to everyone.   Cheers, John K