RK:
What you say is true and it is interesting. I remember when I was able to spend a fair amount of time on the production floor with Apollo a number of years ago, we were talking about seamless vs welded tubing. Their engineers confided that while they were glad that the market at that time seemed to view seamless tubing as being more accurate for shaft making because of the little changes in the welded tubes from the actual welding and heat treatment and material properties as you mentioned, they were glad that the industry did not know the little "problems" that they faced daily with working with seamless tubing. They admitted that piercing and drawing the seamless blanks was never as accurate on wall thickness as was welding a coiled strip. So while they did not have the little changes in the tube from the welding, TT and RP did not have the wall thickness problems to deal with that Apollo did. In the end, what matters is what the final product tests out to be consistency wise, and no one will be perfect - but in a run of 1000 steel vs 1000 graphite that just come off the production line, the variation in graphite is going to always be a little greater simply because steel has fewer manufacturing procedures that can create measurable differences in the end product. Thanks, TOM -----Original Message----- From: Richard Kennedy [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, October 13, 2003 9:34 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: ShopTalk: Residual Bend N plane - Steel Shafts Tom / All, As being a retired Manufacturing Engineer from Ford Motor and having seen the "BUTT" welding process that you are talking about I would like to add my $0.02 worth into the mix. Yes as you have stated that during the "BUTT" welding process there is no way that any foreign particle (s) can get into the mix so to say, being that it is preformed in a positive atmosphere chamber, low OX. However although nothing can be added into the mix a very important item is reduced during the process, which can not be reintroduced back into the steel "CARBON". As to it's bending and having "HARD" areas it was explained to me by the Bunding Tubing ME's, which by the way supplied several shaft companies, not TT however, their predrawn material in 20' lengths, is what causes the tubing to be soft in the area of the "BUTT" weld and for approx. 15% to either side of the welded material. I was told that since most of the carbon, approx. 95%. is depleted during the welding process this area is of great concern to both Bunding Tubing and it's customers, It should be noted that the entire automotive industry plus others is not effected by this mainly because the material that is used by the auto industry is made from a very low carbon steel.. It should also be noted that since the tubing used for shaft manufacturing is of a "Heat Treatable" type (grade) of steel, very high carbon, it also contains about 10 to 15% high carbon scrap, such as ball bearings, dowel pins, etc, etc, it is because of this that steel shafts have more than one hard side or soft side If the scrap is of very high quality or the furnace is not brought up to full heat, 2750* to 2950* this happens quite often, I was told by the ME's at the Ford steel plant, during start ups after long down periods such as long weekends, holidays. As i stated up front it's just my view on the subject. RK KENNEDY golf equipment manufacturer's of world class golfclub repair equipment -------Original Message------- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Monday, October 13, 2003 11:03:41 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: ShopTalk: Residual Bend N plane - Steel Shafts 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
