At 12:47 PM 8/4/2008, Tom wrote:
Now that I'm back on the subject, after my sorry experience with the so-called "R" flex Cobra M/Speed driver, I think it's about time for shaft mfr's to get their collective butts in gear and come up with a definition of what's R, what's S, and so on. It shouldn't be too difficult.
It's not difficult from a technical point of view. The difficulty is all political and economic.
Why would the OEMs ever buy into a standard on such stuff? The LAST thing they want is for golf clubs to become a commodity. They make their markup with fictitious product differentiation. Standards would threaten their profit. And, if the OEMs don't buy into a standard, it will be meaningless.
I discuss this in my technology forecast article. Go to <http://www.tutelman.com/golf/clubs/techForecast.php> and scroll down to the section on Standards.
Every clubmaker who's ever called himself that has measured shaft after shaft from the same mfr, same model, same batch, and compared it to other mfr's shafts and found no sensible correlation in flex, weight, MOI, spine, etc. That's a damn shame.
Why limit yourself to different manufacturers? Try different models from the same manufacturer, and you might find a "damn shame". For instance, you'd expect models from TrueTemper named, Dynamic, Dynamic Lite, and Dynalite to have similar actual flexes for the same nominal flex. Think so? Get out your frequency meter and try it!
No cheers this time, DaveT
