SST Pure Media Articles

The spinning of spining

By John Strege
Reprinted from Golf Digest Magazine
November 2000

The shaft has been described as a club's engine, the instrument that delivers the club-head to the ball, but has it been doing so in the most efficient manner?

This question is at the root of a debate quietly brewing in the equipment industry: Is shaft orientation (also called shaft spining) a viable means by which a set of clubs can be made to perform uniformly, or is it a myth?

In one corner is Richard Weiss and his company, Strategic Shaft Technologies. Weiss believes that no graphite or steel is perfectly round or perfectly straight, and that by identifying where the irregularities exist, each shaft can be oriented in the clubhead in a way that enables clubs to perform optimally.

His opponent is the equipment industry in general, which tends to pass off Weiss' ideas as snake oil. One executive even likened shaft orientation to the old fiction that a ball would perform better were it to be struck with the logo aligned in a certain direction.

On which side does the truth fall?

Tour professionals seem to be swinging the momentum toward Weiss. More than 60 players have had SST orient their shafts, according to Weiss. Among them have been golf legend Jack Nicklaus, and his son Gary, and Scott Verplank, who won the Reno-Tahoe Open in August using "spined" shafts.

At the core of the argument is the "droop" that occurs in the clubhead at or near impact, caused by the centrifugal force generated by swing speed. (Droop is a term used to de-scribe the bowing down of the club as it approaches impact.)

Each side agrees that droop exists, but can it be minimized by orienting the shaft in a certain direction?

Minimizing the droop would enable the shaft to deliver the clubhead to the ball in a more consistent and efficient manner. The desired effect would be straighter and longer shots.

"I'm looking for the strongest part of the shaft, and I'm going to point it in the hit direction," Weiss says. "It braces the shaft from bending or twisting. It stabilizes the shaft."

SST's computers identify the principal planar oscillation plane. Translated, it locates the shaft orientation that results in greatest shaft stability at impact.

Golfers often identify a favorite club from a seemingly matched set, which in all likelihood, Weiss says, is the result of the shaft randomly having been properly oriented on that particular club.

"I don't buy into it," says Wilson Sporting Goods' Carl Scheie, a 27-year veteran of the club-making business who holds a Ph.D. in physics. "They have not demonstrated that what they're measuring has any relationship to reality. By doing this little trick you can get fantastic improvement? I'm not buying it."

Neither is Bob Bush, a consultant with Adams Golf and former director of shaft development at True Temper. "It's much ado about nothing," he says. "Years ago, we made spine shafts [in steel], much thicker at one angle, and we oriented the shafts and hit them on the machine and saw zero difference. We also put them in the hands of people, and not one could make out a difference. Secondly, during a swing, a shaft rotates on a longitudinal axis. Assuming it's in the right position [at impact], it must be completely wrong someplace else during the swing."

A convert is Tom Wishon, technical director for Golfsmith. "I used to be on the con side," Wishon says. "He [Weiss] had to come here for weeks and weeks and do his demonstrations before he convinced us.

"The clubhead can move more than a half-inch," Wishon says. "All of us are going to make bad swings. Now here comes the shaft, bending up and down and moving the head with it -- that's an additional error that you didn't cause."

Wishon cites as an example Verplank, who represents Golf-smith on tour. "When it comes to his equipment, Scott's always been an extremely picky person," says Wishon. Verplank would endure a tedious trial-and-error process before finding nine irons to comprise a set, Wishon says. In May 1999, Wishon oriented a set of irons that he delivered to an unknowing Verplank at the MasterCard Colonial. "He never asked to change one of them," Wishon says. "I'd never had him do that before. In the past, we had always gone back and forth. This isn't a scientific study, but do you call it a coincidence?"

Verplank says the graphite shafts in his irons react with the consistency of steel, though he won't credit the fact they were oriented for him. More likely, he says, the quality of the shafts are responsible. He does say the average player is more likely to benefit from shaft orientation. "I play all the time," he says. "If a club doesn't feel right, I'll do something to it to get it to go the distance I want it to. For the average guy who doesn't hit so many balls, it might help more."

Gary Nicklaus says he failed to recognize a discernible difference in his irons after the shafts had been oriented. "But I took my 3-wood, which I wasn't hitting well at all, and I put a couple of [different] shafts in it and still didn't hit it well," Nicklaus says. "I pulled out the same shaft, had it done on the SST, put it back in, and it was a completely different golf club. That was four months ago, and it's been in my bag ever since."

Detractors will argue that players claiming to recognize a difference are experiencing a placebo effect. Weiss counters that players' long-term satisfaction indicates something in play other than a placebo effect.

Why, then, has shaft orientation not gained acceptance among manufacturers? Among the theories is that if they were to make shaft orientation a standard step in club assembly it would add substantially to the cost of each set of clubs. For example, SST's suggested retail price to retrofit a single club is $40, though a licensing fee to an OEM (original equipment manufacturer) incorporating the process into a club's initial assembly would diminish this cost.

Still, a small licensing fee for orienting the shafts in a set of, say, eight irons (3 through pitching wedge) as well as the additional labor costs would send price points soaring.

The U.S. Golf Association, meanwhile, does not take a position on whether shaft orientation provides a benefit. However, it does permit the process, as it stated in a notice to manufacturers in February of 1999. "Orienting a shaft with the intent of causing it to perform as if it were symmetrical would not be inconsistent with Rule 4-1b," the notice reads. An important point to remember is that orienting a shaft in a way that might correct a hook or a slice remains an infraction of the rules.

Weiss' objective, he says, has been only to orient the shaft in a manner that permits it to perform as though it were symmetrical, ensuring uniform playability throughout an entire set.

"It works for golfers of all skill levels," Weiss says emphatically.

Just as emphatically, Bob Bush says, "If you say it often enough, it sounds real good."

The much-publicized trampoline-effect issue may have received all the headlines, but shaft spining may or may not play just as integral a role in club optimization. With that in mind, expect more testing, more arguing --and, ultimately, more controversy.

"I think if you can get clubs that are consistent through-out your bag," Gary Nicklaus says, "it's not going to do any-thing but help you."