"People who say it doesn't work have a vested interest in it not
working,Weiss said." And those that say it does work have a vested,
substantially I might add, interest in you believing that it does. It
makes no sense to me that Nike would build 12 virtually identical sets of
clubs, except for two that had their shafts Pured. Much more likely that
Nike built six sets of 2 with slightly different characteristics, one pair
of which included Pured shafts. If Woods were going to select two sets
from supposedly identical clubs it makes much more sense for him to select
two of the twelve drivers, two of the twelve 3-woods, etc, down to his
wedges. It seems highly unlikely that Nike would try and sneak two sets
with Pured shafts in on Woods, the control freak, for a "blind" test. I
would wager that Woods knew about it. And that he picked Pured shafts for
the same reason most of the rest of the pros do because it might help, it
can't hurt, and it's free.
Weiss is still pushing the data taken at Golf Labs over 10 years ago as
justification for his Puring process. I looked at that data about 6 years
ago armed with a couple hours of discussions with Gene Parente (Golf Labs)
on the expected variations and errors in outdoor robot testing. There is
nowhere near enough data in Weiss' tests (the published data) to conclude,
with any level of confidence, that Puring made a difference. There is
slightly less scatter in the Pured shaft data but to say that such a small
data set, given the variability of the testing process, is any more than
serendipitous coincidence would take someone desperate to do so.
That the Pure Spec machine measures torsional stiffness may have some
merit, IF torsional stiffness varies any where nearly as much as they are
implying, which seems unlikely. Even if it did it's not clear that it
would have a noticeable effect on the way the clubs played. Most of the
pros play steel shafts in their irons which will have as little variation
in their torsional stiffness as they do azimuthal variation in their
longitudinal stiffness. That leaves a couple graphite shafted clubs in
their bags one of which they swing very differently anyway. It doesn't
compute.
But then Titleist sells a ton of ProV's to golfers they are completely
wrong for. At least Puring won't hurt any thing but your wallet.
Alan
At 12:41 PM 2/17/2009 -0500, you wrote:
Good article in Golfweek by Jim Achenbach on the new SST Pure machine.
According to the article, "Tiger had his clubs checked and adjusted by
SST. As revealed by Nike insiders, the company assembled a dozen sets of
irons for Woods, with only two sets being PUREd. In blind testing, Woods
picked those two PUREd sets as his primary set and backup set."
The shaft companies don't seem to think much of it. Maybe because of this:
"Now, for the first time, the industry is going to be able to monitor the
torsional stiffness of a shaft very quickly at playing length. It can be
done in 6 seconds. Some people are not going to like this, because many of
the (torque) numbers printed on shafts right now are nominal, at best."
Here's the article:
http://sstpure.com/media/golfweek090207.html
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Thanks!
John Muir
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