At 12:51 PM 12/23/02 -0500, Al Taylor wrote:
I have NOT been following this thread but do usually read your comments. Please excuse this question if it has been already addressed. I am sure you are familiar with the Flex Master. Is this Neufinder thing another version of the FM? Thanks.Great question, Al!!!
I've been mentioning this in private correspondence with Dan and especially Charlie B, but remarkably little has been said by anybody else.
There are certainly some family resemblances, especially in the uses to which it is put. In fact, I think the similarities are bigger than the differences. Here is a comparison as I see it:
(1) First the obvious surface difference. The FlexMaster (FM) measures force for a given deflection. The NeuFinder2 (NF2) measures deflection of the butt against a known tip deflection, when the butt is held, not rigidly, but by a spring. It's a very obvious difference in design, but a very small difference in practice.
(2) The primary use of the NF2 (at least for Bernie, who posts as much as anybody about it) is to match shafts -- either to one another when "duplicating" a club or from club to club in a set. That is also the primary use of the FM.
I have yet to completely understand the NF2 process for matching a set. But it is distinctly different from the FM. The NF2 tries to achieve a difference in reading from club to club, while the FM varies the position of the deflected tip from club to club and tries to maintain the same reading.
(3) Both can be used as a spine finder, either a simple spine finder or a correct one. The simple one is the one "everybody" uses; spin the shaft and find it by feel. The correct one is to find the difference in force due to a known deflection, and measure this around the shaft.
The FM does it fairly naturally, since there is a movement of a fixed deflection and a zero button to press before the fixed movement is undertaken.
The NF2 needs to do it using arithmetic to find the difference in reading, and a new reversible bearing that Dan has designed but not posted yet. Should work nicely, though much more tediously than the FM.
(4) The FM may be calibrated well enough to talk about shafts in terms of absolute readings, from machine to machine. (That is one of the biggest advantages of a frequency machine; its output is the most important number that clubmakers use to describe a shaft.) I don't know if the FM is that accurate, but it may well be. The NF2 is known not to be. My most important work with the NF2 group is to come up with a set of calibration adjustments and procedures so that it can be used for this purpose.
(5) This last comparison would not be obvious on the surface, but the placement and arrangement of the bearings is a really big difference.
The FM has three sets of bearings, roughly equally spaced.
The NF2 has three sets of bearings, two of them quite close together on a rotating member. The rotation angle of that member is basically the reading. That makes it the same as a deflection board with a metered readout.
I just looked at Don White's patent for the FM. Didn't read the whole thing, but I went over the claims. I don't think much of Don White's patent lawyer. (Maybe Don pulled a do-it-yourself and wrote his own patent; I KNOW he should have hired an actor instead of do-it-yourself for his promo video. :-) Doesn't look to me like any lawyer in the world could win an infringement suit against the NF2. Of course, our court system has come out with surprising verdicts in the past, so I could be wrong. :-(
Hope this answers your question.
DaveT
