Hi Alan, I didn't see any response to your question so I thought I'd give you my two cents worth.
Finding these two planes has nothing whatsoever to do with their "stabililty". I just so happens FLO will occur in these to planes so they are easy to identify by the FLOing process. The reason many clubmakers, myself included, try to align the weak plane in some orientation is to minimize the shaft's rotation or twisting during the swing. If you bend a shaft in anything other than it's weakest plane Mother Nature will try to rotate that shaft into its weakest plane. That's what you see when you bend a shaft in a spine finder. The problem becomes what plane is the shaft bent in during the swing? Unfortunately the shaft rotates during the swing so who knows whether the weakest plane is really being bent or not. Some rather brief tests I ran with some rather bad shafts indicated to me that weak plane at 3:00/9:00 or 9:00/3:00 (they're the same) worked best. The very best solution however seems to me to be to just by shafts with very little differential stiffness. A max variation of 1 cpm is not uncommon in some name brand shafts. Aligning these shafts I think is a waste of time. Cheers, John K ----- Original Message ----- From: Alan Brooks <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Shop Talk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, December 06, 2004 4:24 PM Subject: ShopTalk: Most stable plane of shaft oscillation > Hi all, > > The question came up recently on Tom Wishon's forum regarding the most > stable plane of shaft oscillation (if there is such a thing). Assume a > simple shaft with more and less stiff bending planes (hence higher and > lower frequency planes), 90* apart. Is one of these two planes more stable > in lateral oscillation than the other? If so, why? Another way of posing > the question is if you twang the shaft in a plane half way between the two > (at 45* to either) and wait for the shaft oscillations to decay into a > single plane, which will it be? > > Thanks, > > Alan Brooks >
