Pieces that are too long for a fitting bay and too specific for the guide pages. Everything here was written because the same conversation kept happening at the desk and somebody decided to write it down properly.
None of this is a substitute for having your own clubs measured. It is background, so that when somebody in a bay tells you the tip section is adding two degrees of presented loft you know what that sentence means and can argue with it if you disagree.
The engraving on a clubhead describes an object at rest. Golf happens to that object while it is bending, twisting and arriving somewhere ahead of your hands. Here is what separates the two figures, how far apart they usually sit, and why every recommendation we make starts from the second one.
Read itA flex letter compresses a whole stiffness curve into one character chosen by a marketing department. We break the same shaft into butt, upper mid, lower mid and tip, and each band answers a different question about what the head will be doing at separation.
Read itRemoving material from the tip does not shorten a shaft in any meaningful sense. It deletes the softest, most active portion of the beam and drags the stiff section toward the head, which moves presented loft further than most adjustable hosels can reach.
Read itA frequency figure with no conditions attached is a rumour. What has to be written beside the number for another builder to reproduce it — clamp length, grip mass, head mass, tip weight — and how we format the transfer sheet we hand out.
Read itAn adjustable hosel offers a fixed range and takes something away for every degree it gives. A shaft change moves the same presented angle by a different mechanism with different side effects. Which lever to reach for, and in what order.
Read itA walk through the printed card that ends every session in this building. What each field records, which ones matter in three years, and how to use the card at a shop that has never heard of us.
Read itRoughly one a season, and only when a question has come up often enough at the desk that answering it individually has become inefficient. There is no publishing schedule, no guest contributors and nothing here was commissioned by a component manufacturer.
Where a piece contains a number, that number came off our own bench or our own doppler unit rather than out of a press release. Where a piece contains a range, the range is honest about how much variation we actually see across golfers, which is usually more than the tidy version of the story would suggest.
Corrections welcome. If something here contradicts what you have measured yourself, we would genuinely like to hear about it. The desk email reaches the people who wrote these.
A thirty-minute spec card review puts real figures against everything described in these pieces, using the clubs already in your bag.