Very similar to my story. The differences, which are less significant than the similarities:
* I have an 18* club, not 23*.
* I got it with a Rifle shaft, not a Bubble. The Rifle turned out to be WAY too stiff. (I wasn't sure I believed my own frequency meter when I saw the super-XX frequency, so I took it over to Charlie B who confirmed it.)
* I replaced it with my favorite Balistik, not a Rifle.
* I cut it to swingweight and let the length fall where it may. I knew in advance the head was heavy for the length I wanted, so I didn't use any tip weight. So I saved a couple of steps from your process -- removing the tip weight and shortening the club -- but wound up with pretty much the same thing you did.
Glad you were finally able to make something worth hitting with that head. It's a real nice piece of engineering; it seemed a shame to let it remain in the grab bag.
Cheers! DaveT
At 06:40 PM 3/13/03 -0800, tflan wrote:
LIke Dr. Dave T., I've been mucking about with a TM 23° Rescue club for about 2 years. I absolutely hate Bubble shafts and so with that attitude I've been unable to hit a Bubbly club unless there's o.b. either left or right, at which time I can hit that sucker pure, left or right.
So, I've installed about 6 shafts in the 23° head. Most recently I stuck a 6.5 Rifle 2 iron taper tip in it. Sure, I know, you can't get a .355" Rifle taper tip shaft in a .390" parallel hosel. Uh huh. Yeah. No way.
So . . . after reshafting the head with the 7 g tip-weighted Rifle, and plugging the butt (gawd, that sounds awful, sorry Jennifer) to make the club finish at 40", I took it to the range. It felt terrible but the ball flight was what I was looking for - high traj and relatively straight, but SW way too heavy (E-1) for my feeble lurch. So, back to the bench. I pushed the head off with my handy-dandy slotted crowbar/propane combo and removed the tip weight. SW stiil more than I wanted. So, I popped the grip with my handy-dandy Sears 120v tire inflation compressor and chopped off 1/2" from the butt (still sounds kinda kinky but, there it is.) I got the SW down to D-4 via no tip weight, 1/2" shorter, and a little heavier grip.
Back to the range. Just about perfect. My decrepit lunge caused the ball to travel (measured from sprinkler heads and measured with my equally handy-dandy Bushnell rangefinder) 184 yards in the air. Just what I was looking to achieve.
So, knowing that a lot of youse guys aren't as anal as am I, I offer this to show that no matter how lousy you may be, given enough time, given the desire, give the resources, you, too, can spend as many hours and $$$ as I have to figure out a way to make a single club go the distance you need it to go.
I sincerly hope this helps y'all.
TFlan
