The fitting season is upon us. We are now offering a weight kit for you to fit Paradym drivers with. This kit has screws in even gram amounts from 2g to 14g, a 9g & a 21g slider, and a red torque wrench that has a different value than a standard wrench. This is $91 if interested. 

Why bring this up?? Well, if you are a serious fitter, you may be into this. My team and I will tinker with these values from time to time. HOWEVER, there’s a caution here. We build by swingweight, not the weights you put in there. What this means… if you fit a player for a Triple Diamond and you use a shaft that is 1″ short – you put an 8g weight in there instead of the 2g that it comes with, the player loves it and wants to order it – you are only halfway there. We build by swingweight. You need to measure the swingweight, then in the order, specify the specs AND swingweight you want. 

Why the hassle? If you tell us to use an 8 & 14 in there, we don’t know what the club really was. All heads are not the same, so we need to know what you actually want, and we’ll build it. If you built this club and the player wants a multi compound grip instead of the Tour velvet you have on your demo club, the balance (swingweight) will be different. You tell us how you want it to finish out, and we’ll build it so that it does. Even though the weights may be different, the swingweight will be the same. Make sense?? 

I thought this was a good time to review a few of our build tolerances and chat about some of the variances.

These are our stock and custom tolerances:

Length: +/- 1/16″

Loft & Lie: (stock) +/- 0.5*, (Custom) +/- 0.125* (that’s an eighth of a degree)

Swingweight: +/- 1 point

These are significand improvements over what we’ve offered in the past and are at the top of the pyramid in the industry. Everything is done via computer now, so the tolerances are super tight and the results are extremely accurate. 

Back in the old days, clubs were adjusted manually. I would frequently get calls about sets that were way off the specs that they were ordered to. In that era, it was difficult to say if it was accurate or not. Machines were (and still are) different. electronic machines need to be calibrated frequently. Back then, it could have been a combination of a bad day for the builder/ bender, and a mis-calibrated machine on this end. If we proceeded to adjust to correct on this end, the specs were almost certainly going to be more off. This doesn’t happen any more. 

Do clubs move over time? In other words, if a club is bent to 2* UP, will it’s specs change as the clubs are used? The answer is maybe. If a club is built with a very soft carbon steel, and a player hits a lot of balls off a range mat that sits on a concrete base, they can move. They may tend to gravitate back to the way they were originally forged. Many clubs today are built with different types of steel, and these don’t tend to move anywhere near as much. Cast clubs don’t move hardly at all. I had to measure my own clubs for a project a few months ago. My current set is almost 3 years old, and the specs were almost perfect. I wrote it off to variances in the machines and didn’t touch them. 

We started this discussion talking about swingweight. A final thought about that. I was asked a question over the weekend by a player who said this: “If I buy a driver at +1″, and I don’t like it, can I just have it cut down.” I said yes, but all the dynamics of the club will be different. It won’t feel the same. He then asked “what if I buy 2 shafts? One at standard length and one at +1″?” I asked him “to use them interchangeably in the same head?” He said yes. I told him the club is built to spec around the shaft that it is ordered with, so if you change the shaft it will alter the balance, weight and feel of the club. Even if you change the shaft with one of the same weight and flex, albeit from a different manufacturer, the club WILL be different. 

All of this, with the tolerances in the build department, and the flexibility to adapt clubs to a wide array of swingweights all make it critical to get the clubs built the way they need to be the first time – ideally we don’t want to alter the original design after assembly. 

I hope this helps!! Happy Fitting.