How will you align your driver shaft?

When aligning your driver shaft, there's many factors to take into consideration.  A surprising one was the graphics - does it really matter?

 

In the last 25 years of club fitting, we’ve seen trends come and go.

 

From FLOing or spine aligning shafts, to having adapters on drivers to change the driver characteristics.

 

It’s been really interesting to watch, because both represented large technological leaps in club building, and yet, couldn’t co-exist.

 

Most golfers felt that having the adaptability of adapters in drivers, that enabled them to change loft and lie, open or closed face etc, out-weighed the benefits of spine aligning.  Afterall, most golfers never had the benefit of spine aligned clubs.

 

What was surprising for me though, was that while working on the clubs of some top professionals when they were in or passing through Singapore en route to PGA or European Tour stops, some of them favored having their shaft graphics aligned, over having their clubs spine aligned.

 

Of those who favored graphics alignment, many of them liked the graphics facing down, so that they see a plain shaft. 

 

With the introduction of adapters on driver heads, some pros even got their clubs re-shafted so that the position of the graphics faced down in their favorite adapter spot, and notably, one pro mentioned that the graphics messed up his alignment so much, that he rather played with the driver head in a less optimal position where he couldn’t see the graphics, instead of in the optimal position for him, where he could see the graphics.

 

The graphite shaft industry has since caught up, with shafts that are much more uniform in wrapping, so there’s no noticeable spines.  These “spineless” shafts were able to be hit consistently regardless of the position of the driver head, a huge bonus for any golfer who really believed in spine aligning his clubs.

 

Unfortunately the adapter industry didn’t catch up, so if you’re someone who likes your graphics facing a certain direction, you’re going to have to put up with graphics facing all different directions unless you get your shaft installed in a fixed position, and use only that position.

 

Then Callaway came up with an adapter that enabled golfers to keep their shaft orientation even with adjustments to the driver head position.  That was a huge win over rivals TaylorMade and Titleist, whose adapters couldn’t be aligned.  However, Titleist has 16 possible adjustments, and TaylorMade has 12, compared to Callaway’s 8.

 

driver shaft alignment adapters compared

 

So, with all things in golf, there’s a trade off right?

 

Well, that was so, until now.

 

We’ve now to a 16 position adapter that enables your shaft to be aligned in any of the 16 positions.

 

And it’ll be stock in our brand new Driver.

 

We’ve created the Driver based on our years of fitting experience, and in tests, we’ve gained as much as 18% distance! 

 

The secret is in having the perfect connections between components for near perfect energy transfer from your swing to the ball, and in fitting both the shaft and the head for swing speed, etc.

 

Watch this space!

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