Shafts: What's Right For You?

BY Tom Wishon

“It seems many moons ago since I first met Tom in Texas working out which end of the club needed how much lead and how many papers made a grip size correctly. His many books and hours of hands on teaching have inspired many of us to keep digging for better results for our own and our clients clubs. The article below came from a discussion on what value is out there in the market place for a player, OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) versus aftermarket shafts.” – Paul Smith 2007

Stock vs Brand Shafts

The evolution of the shafts that are offered by the various golf companies in their standard made clubs sold off the rack in pro shops and golf retail stores is a fascinating topic both from the business as well as the performance and design standpoint. Virtually no golf club company manufactures their own shafts. All shafts are produced by companies that specialise in the manufacture of shafts made either from steel alloys or from graphite composite materials.

At present it is estimated there are more than fifty different companies that produce golf shafts; three of these companies make all of the world’s steel shafts, while the others compete for the industry’s business in graphite shafts. The reason there are so few makers of steel shafts is because the cost of the machinery required and the size of the facility necessary to house this equipment to create steel shafts is far greater than the cost of equipping a factory to manufacture graphite shafts. Add in the fact that the vast majority of steel shafts sell for a much lower price than do the majority of graphite shafts and it becomes evident why so few companies are engaged in the business of producing steel shafts.

Most of the shaft makers do their business in two areas; designing, producing, marketing and selling shafts which carry the shaft company’s brand and model name, and producing proprietary shafts for the various golf club companies which carry each club company’s own brand and model name. There are quite a number of graphite shaft making companies that only produce shafts in volume for golf club companies and choose not to incur the greater expense of developing and marketing shafts under their own brand.

Most golfers are quite familiar with the shaft makers who develop, market and sell their own branded shafts. For example, True Temper (Dynamic, Dynalite, TX Tour, etc), UST (ProForce, V2, I-Rod, etc), Grafalloy (Blue, Pro Launch, etc) Aldila (NV, NVS, etc) and Fujikura (Speeder, Tour Platform, Banzai, etc) are just a few of the shaft companies that have chosen to maintain an ongoing focus of designing and marketing shafts under their own brand and shaft model name.

Prior to the 1990s, virtually all of the shafts used in the golf club companies’ stock club models were the branded shafts from the shaft makers who were successful in marketing a brand and model name awareness for their shafts among golfers. In the mid-1990s, this practice began to change as the big golf club companies began to only use shafts that carried each golf club company’s brand and model name.

The reason this change came about was twofold. First, the big golf club companies began to realise the business importance of fully promoting their brand name on the clubs they market and sell. The club companies no longer wished to spend their money to help promote a shaft company’s brand within the total marketing of their golf clubs. Second, the big club companies no longer wanted to pay the higher price for the shaft companies’ branded shafts. By having shafts made with their own brand and model name, the club companies could negotiate a much lower price per shaft and significantly increase their profits. While some of the big club companies continue to use branded shafts in their irons, virtually all of the graphite shafts installed in the club companies’ models are produced as a proprietary shaft for and labelled only with the club company’s brand and model name.

Shopping For Shafts

When you head out to shop for a driver or a new set of clubs, what are you getting in the stock shafts offered by each of the golf club companies? Are they as good as the branded shafts from the various shaft making companies? Or to contrast, do golfers gain any performance advantage by having the club companies’ stock shafts removed and re-shafted with one of the name model shafts from the branded shaft companies?

Once again, the answers to these questions start with the business side of the golf club industry. All the club companies that wholesale their assembled golf clubs to pro shops, retail off-course golf stores and to internet companies are compelled by business inventory practices to make their clubs in a standard form; the same length, the same face angle, the same grip size, the same total weight, the same swingweight, the same lie angles with only a limited selection of driver lofts and two or three flexes within the same model of shaft.

If the club companies were to put two or more different shaft models into their primary clubhead model, when each shaft model would need to be offered in two or three flexes, the retailers would refuse to inventory such a wider selection. A golf retailer will typically stock between 5 and 15 different brands of golf clubs so they can offer a wide variety of club company brands to their customers. To have to stock the same club brand/model in different shaft models, each with two or three flexes, would create an undesirable inventory management problem for both the club company and the retailer.

Because the club companies and retailers do not want to offer golfers more than one shaft model, the single standard shaft installed in each of the golf club companies’ different clubhead models has to be chosen to suit an “average golfer.” As a result, virtually all of the stock graphite shafts in OEM clubs sold off the rack are made between 65-75 grams in weight, with 4 to 5 degrees of torque, and a little softer in each letter flex version so as to at least reduce the chance of the golfer hitting the club poorly because of the shaft being too stiff.

Golfers with better than average swing characteristics, i.e. stronger golfers with a more aggressive downswing tempo and a later release of the wrist cock angle before impact will usually find the stock shafts in the big club companies’ models to be too soft in both overall flex and tip section flex, and in some cases too light in weight. But for the average golfer with their average tempo and earlier to mid-downswing unhinging of the wrist cock angle, the stock shafts are not going to pose many shotmaking problems – their problems will come from the standard made clubs being too long in length, without the right face angle to address their slice, and many other specifications that simply don’t allow the golfer to play to the best of their present and given ability.

The shaft manufacturing companies’ branded shafts still maintain a strong following among golfers who have an above average interest in the equipment, primarily because of the use of some of these shaft models on the world’s professional golf tours. Most of the larger shaft companies have representatives on the world professional tours who work to get the pros to use their branded shafts in tournaments. Rarely do the shaft companies pay pros to use their shafts; some do, but the vast majority of shafts in use on the professional tours are not “paid to be played”, and are chosen by the pros because they like a specific shaft model’s performance and feel. Unlike the large club companies, the shaft companies do not make enough profit to allow them to offer money to the pros to use their shafts.

Cost vs Quality?

Over the last few years, a number of graphite shafts have been introduced which sell for very high prices. During the 1990s and early 2000s, an expensive graphite shaft would sell for US$50. Over the past few years shafts which sell for US$150, US$200, US$300 and even US$1200 (!!) have been introduced by companies such as Fujikura, Mitsubishi (Diamana brand), and Matrix Ozik, to name a few. Is there a performance advantage in using a high priced shaft over one that sells for far less?

Prior to the advent of the sub-$100 graphite shaft, it used to be said that the two performance factors that increased the cost of a shaft were weight and torque. The lighter the weight and the lower the torque of the graphite shaft, the higher the shaft would cost to make. For example, golfers and custom Clubmakers can find hundreds of graphite shafts which weigh 65-70 grams, are made with 4 to 5 degrees of torque, and which sell for $20-30 each.

Once the weight of the shaft drops below 60 grams and/or the torque below 3.5 degrees, the selling price of the shaft will almost double. To drop the weight and torque to such levels while maintaining stiffness requires the use of higher cost graphite material. In addition, more labour cost is required to wrap a greater number of graphite layers with their fibres at an angle to the shaft to lower the torque.

That’s still a long way from $200-$300, so what is it that makes these very high priced shafts so special? If you ask the companies that make them, you’ll hear the explanation come from the much higher cost of the more sophisticated, higher strength, higher modulus graphite fibres used in the shafts’ manufacture.

Yes, there is no question that a wide range exists in the cost of the different types of raw graphite fibre material available to any of the industries that make products from graphite fibre composite materials. Do these high price fibres ensure better shaft performance?

How a shaft performs for any golfer is a product of how well its weight, torque, balance point (weight distribution) and overall flex design matches the strength and swing characteristics of each golfer. For more than 90% of all golfers, the proper shaft design specifications can be created in a shaft that sells for $30 just as well as they can in a shaft that sells for ten times that amount. The secret to finding the right shaft for YOUR strength and swing requires working with a very experienced custom clubmaker who has studied shaft technology and shaft fitting in depth. Not all custom Clubmakers possess the depth of knowledge required to accurately fit the shaft to all types of golfers.

Fitting the clubheads and the assembly specifications of golf clubs to golfers is far easier than fitting the shaft, primarily because there are recognised standards for measuring all of the specifications of clubheads and the assembled club. But not so with shafts. There has never been an agreed standard in the golf equipment industry for how stiff an L, A, R, S or X flex is or should be. In fact, there is no uniform manner of even measuring the stiffness of shafts in the golf industry! Each company is free to define their own methods of measurement and parameters for how stiff each of their flexes are to be. As a result, the R flex from one company may have the same stiffness as the S flex from another company, or the A flex from yet a different shaft maker.

It is only from Clubmakers who have initiated their own form of shaft testing and measurement, or from Clubmakers who perform quantitative shaft analysis that a golfer will be able to more precisely pinpoint what shaft will perform best for their strength and swing characteristics.