SPINE ALIGN GOLF INSTALL

If a shaft is regular along one axis and stiff along the other how do you install it in the club? It's best to buy good shafts. I've seen as much as 12-cpm difference between these two frequencies in some shafts. In wrapped graphite shafts this is not always the case due to the seam and wobbling can be pretty wild. Often, manufactures do not assemble clubs with precise alignment of.

The two frequencies in a steel shaft or a filament wound graphite shaft are generally very close such that very little wobble will occur. The modern golf shaft has a spine hiding behind the shiny finish and printed branding. If the shaft is flexed anywhere in between both frequencies will be excited and the two will beat against one another causing the shaft to wobble. At one point you will get one of these frequencies and by rotating the shaft 90 degrees you'll get the other. NOTE 3: If you get into the hairiest of mathematics you'll find any shaft has two natural frequencies and they are always located 90 degrees apart on the shaft. I tried a blind test and the weak axis at 9:00 was definitely the preferred alignment. In one case the strong axis was at 9:00 the other the weak axis at 9:00. I built two identical drivers with both 250cpm axes pointed at 9:00. One had a weak axis of 250 cpm (other axis at 258) and the other a strong axis of 250 cpm (other axis at 242). I sorted through a pile of them and found two that had an eight cpm variation.

Unfortunately their worst shafts were pretty good. These shafts had frequency variations of up to 15 cpm! I checked with my local shaft purveyor and tried to buy the crummiest shafts I could find. A number of clubmakers recently reported very good results with very poor shafts when the spine was properly aligned. NOTE 22: I tried another spine alignment test with some interesting results.

Spine align golf