To John and Alan and those interested Yes the shaft when vibrated will find the plane of least resistance or as John would say the weakest plane. This should be a satisfactory plane to align the shaft in. However, I feel that the most important factor in shaft alignment is the shafts stability during the loading phase of the swing. It is my desire to get the shaft to load on plane and will only do so when stable in that plane. For instance if the shaft is prebowed it is stable if we load it in the bowed direction but unstable if bowed in any other direction. Therefore, If we load the prebowed shaft in the direction of the bow it will load on plane and unload on plane until it is back to its 0 load position. As the shaft passes though the 0 load position and starts loading against the bow it will become unstable and leave the plane but who cares the ball is gone. THis same situation is true when the spine problem is one where you have a shaft that has a hard side or more material on one side the the other. In thi! s case for the same stability reasons the hard side should be tward the target. Our real objective should be to keep the shaft on a stable plane diring loading so that it will unload back to impact in a stable plane.
llhack -----Original Message----- From: John Kaufman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Dec 7, 2004 7:48 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: ShopTalk: Most stable plane of shaft oscillation Hi Alan, I didn't see any response to your question so I thought I'd give you my two cents worth. Finding these two planes has nothing whatsoever to do with their "stabililty". I just so happens FLO will occur in these to planes so they are easy to identify by the FLOing process. The reason many clubmakers, myself included, try to align the weak plane in some orientation is to minimize the shaft's rotation or twisting during the swing. If you bend a shaft in anything other than it's weakest plane Mother Nature will try to rotate that shaft into its weakest plane. That's what you see when you bend a shaft in a spine finder. The problem becomes what plane is the shaft bent in during the swing? Unfortunately the shaft rotates during the swing so who knows whether the weakest plane is really being bent or not. Some rather brief tests I ran with some rather bad shafts indicated to me that weak plane at 3:00/9:00 or 9:00/3:00 (they're the same) worked best. The very best solution however seems to me to be to just by shafts with very little differential stiffness. A max variation of 1 cpm is not uncommon in some name brand shafts. Aligning these shafts I think is a waste of time. Cheers, John K ----- Original Message ----- From: Alan Brooks <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Shop Talk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, December 06, 2004 4:24 PM Subject: ShopTalk: Most stable plane of shaft oscillation > Hi all, > > The question came up recently on Tom Wishon's forum regarding the most > stable plane of shaft oscillation (if there is such a thing). Assume a > simple shaft with more and less stiff bending planes (hence higher and > lower frequency planes), 90* apart. Is one of these two planes more stable > in lateral oscillation than the other? If so, why? Another way of posing > the question is if you twang the shaft in a plane half way between the two > (at 45* to either) and wait for the shaft oscillations to decay into a > single plane, which will it be? > > Thanks, > > Alan Brooks >
