Dave et al: I''ll throw my 2 cents worth in on this and offer the premise that what you are seeing in the difference of the steel shafts vs graphite is explained by the two different manufacturing processes. Steel shafts are almost all made from steel sheet material that is coiled and high frequency welded into the tube from which the shafts are then drawn and step tapered. The sheet is very precise for thickness and mechanical properties. Very few steel shafts are now made from piercing billets and drawing a seamless tube since Apollo is gone. The "welding" is really a high frequency fusing process that melts the coiled steel plate to itself, hence no 'foreign material' is introduced to the tube and the tube remain homogenous. The fuse line is skived very precisely so that after heat treatment and drawing, even x-ray checking has a very difficult time identifying the fusing line. Thus to see only a 3cpm difference circumferentially is very likely.
TOM W -----Original Message----- From: Dave Tutelman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, October 12, 2003 6:58 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: ShopTalk: Residual Bend N plane - Steel Shafts --- In [EMAIL PROTECTED], "David Rees" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Now I have to pick up a freqency meter and re-align all the shafts in my > clubs. All my steel shafted clubs are aligned according to the residual > bend detected by my spine finder, it's probably as good as random > alignment. > > Doh! ;-) To which Harry Schiestel replied... At 03:38 AM 10/12/03 +0000, golf54com wrote: >Without the expensive equipment, we may need to FLO steel shafts to >ensure we get the true plane. I was hoping this wasn't necessary, >as I find FLOing steel shafts to be so bloody time consuming, sigh. > >I watch tour players execute near flawless shots, and that of my son >hitting 5 iron shots to a tight circle. Why then is that possible, >given our current alignment methods and flawed assembly techniques >(lacks precision)? Could many steel shafts (Apollo excluded from my >experience) demonstrate good FLO on the residual bend N plane? That's certainly one possible hypothesis. Here are all I could think of, and there are probably more: (1) Most steel shafts happen to demonstrate FLO on the residual bend plane (as you suggest). This isn't as crazy as it seems. It is possible that the same manufacturing (process) flaws produce bend and spine, meaning that the two would be correlated. (2) What really matters to performance is the combined bend an spine (as Dan Neubecker has suggested; I don't believe this but can't dismiss it out of hand, since there is no real evidence pro or con). (3) Steel shafts seldom have a lot of spine -- typically less than 3cpm. That small a spine may make no discernable performance difference, so any alignment would have worked as well with those shafts. (This is my favorite hypothesis of the three.) As I said, there are probably more hypotheses. Harry, you're a test expert. How would we design a test to find the proper one? Oh yeah. There's also the human factor, as you note yourself... >Dave, maybe your clubs with steel shafts exhibit little residual >bend and are superior to just random orientation. If you believe >now that your clubs are all wrong, then after your next few rounds, >let us know if your score balloons ... ha, ha. If the tests are golfer tests rather than human tests, then "ha ha" becomes a very serious test parameter. Cheers! DaveT
