100 lb club at D3 swingweight... just add grip weight meme

[joostin]

"Not sure why it doesn't feel right, it's D3..."

 

Just having some fun with the counterbalancing topic complete with a meme.  Look, to each his/her own - if it works for you, do what you gotta do... get the ball to the hole with your preffered tools and methods.  But the swingweight scale was not designed for hitting a swingweight number by manipulating grip weight.  You can read Robert Adams' scale patent and the 10,000+ posts by @Stuart_G.

 

Here's a normal 6 iron @ 437.5g total weight at D3, and a 100 lb (45+ kg) 6 iron also at D3 using the calculator.  Same shaft LOL - it's a little bent, but it's still the desired D3!  And yes, you can manipulate a telephone pole to be D3.

 

 

Because the fulcrum is not at the butt, the scale allows you to counterbalance however you want, though it wasn't intended to.  An MOI machine on the other hand has a fulcrum at the butt, so it doesn't work the same (MOI will increase with a heavier grip).  Changes to head, shaft, grip, length... Lead tape by feel and performance.

[JCAG]

Great graphic. You say D3 is to heavy for you. Let me reduce it to D0. Feel lighter?

[Billfitz]

This shows why swing weight isn't the same as club weight, a concept that's not understood by all be any means. You can have higher swing weight with lower club weight, or lower swing weight with higher club weight. My preference is for a high swing weight with low club weight, but that runs counter to my preference for weatherproof oversize grips. I use DriTac OS anyway, because my grip comfort is more important to me than either swing weight or club weight.

[BREWMASTER95060]

5-7

dynamic gold SL----- about 106 grams

 8-SW

KBS tour 130 X
SHAFTS AND HEADS ALL USED
OFF EBAY.
lead tape everywhere

 

 

Edited June 9 by BREWMASTER95060

Edited September 19, 2021 by BREWMASTER95060

[denkea]

On 9/19/2021 at 11:30 AM, JCAG said:

Great graphic. You say D3 is to heavy for you. Let me reduce it to D0. Feel lighter?

John.  For most people with a heightened sense of feel.  Yes it will feel lighter.  

[JCAG]

Before there were a lot of steel shaft selections it was not uncommon to mix shafts such as TT Dynalite in longer clubs. TT Lite in mid clubs. TT Dynamic in shorter clubs. Kind of like like Rifle Flighted before its time.

 

[JCAG]

8 hours ago, denkea said:

John.  For most people with a heightened sense of feel.  Yes it will feel lighter.  

At 100 pounds, yea they will feel the difference when they swing it.....LOL

[denkea]

14 hours ago, JCAG said:

At 100 pounds, yea they will feel the difference when they swing it.....LOL

Well, John lets take the argument up to a ton (2000#).  Geez.  

You may not be able to, but some individuals have a very keen sense of heft.  Which is, after all,  what swing weight is all about. 

I mean.  Take a look at all the bags on the PGA tour and take note of all the lead tape on the clubs.  What do you suppose they are trying to achieve?  To change how the club feels in their hands?  

The argument that you can make a telephone pole swing weight at D2 holds as much credence as saying 10" wheels on your car won't make much difference. 

 

[Billfitz]

Lead tape has two purposes. One is to affect the swing path in or out via toe or heel or tail weighting, the other is to increase the mass of the head. That will change swing weight, but that's not necessarily the reason to do it. More mass on the club head puts more energy into the ball for more distance. When you're as pumped as today's pros are you can handle the extra weight. I bet Bryson has his driver filled with sand.

[joostin]

Here's the thing:  The swingweight scale invention was meant to be a "close enough" and quick/convenient approximation of matching swinging heft of clubs, BUT people mistake it as gospel (gotta hit D3).

 

If you read the patent you'll see Robert Adams say that his invention is "adequate" and "sufficient".  Here's a clip below.  Also we know in the early 1930s they weren't working with the various different materials and weightings of components like we have now.  We have a lot more variables now.

---

Although any convenient apparatus may be used for this purpose,

it is preferred to employ a movable poise carri'ed on a graduated scale beam. I have found in actual practice that satisfactory results are realized if the fixed point be located a distance of fourteen inches from the grip end.

While the heft or swinging,weight" of the club is a quantity involving dynamic as well as static considerations, it has been found that the method of the present invention, which involves only a simple staticalmeasurement, affords an adequate procedure for matching clubs. 

---

 

In other words "good enough", but YMMV!

Edited September 25, 2021 by joostin

[BREWMASTER95060]

The version of this I remember is Ouimet hand picked his clubs by feel
and the swing weight scale was "invented" to mimic that sense of feel.
 

Swing weight is a static balance which was introduced about 80 years ago based on balancing Francis Ouimet's -- US Open champion 1913 -- clubs. It was found that the same weight could be added to the butt end of each club in his set and they would balance on a fulcrum 14 inches from the grip end of the club.

 

 MOI is a dynamic balance and clubs so balanced will be close to the PURE swing weight balancing as it was originally developed based on Francis Ouimet’s set (first amateur to win the US Open in 1913 at 20 years old). This set was assembled by Francis Ouimet based on club feel with length and head weight being the only variables and the results closely match MOI matching.

 

n the early 1930s, a clubmaker named Robert Adams invented the swingweight scale. It was a balance that measured the amount of torque the weight of the club exerted about a pivoting fulcrum.  The diagram shows a modern swingweight scale taken from the 2006 Golfsmith catalog, but it is basically the same instrument that Adams used alnost 80 years earlier. The weight of the club exerts a counterclockwise torque on the beam, because the center of gravity of the club is to the left of the fulcrum. The clubfitter moves the sliding weight until its clockwise torque balances the torque from the weight of the club. The position of the sliding weight then gives the "swingweight" of the club. Notice from the picture below (a scan from Adams' original patent), how little the design has changed over three quarters of a century.

After much experimenting, Adams concluded that a fulcrum 14" from the butt seemed to give the "best" match, in a subjective sense, for the pros he worked for. Why 14"? Did that correspond to some sort of "pivot point" in the golfer's swing? No, it was just a number that seemed to work; it yielded a set of clubs that Adams' clients felt were well matched.  (As we shall see later, this is not a perfect match to moment of inertia, but it's not a bad match at all.  So Adams-matched clubs would be a little different from MOI-matched clubs, but not hugely so.)  Adams' scale was used to match Francis Ouimet's and Bobby Jones' clubs, with obvious success.
Adams used an arbitrary letter-number scale (e.g.- "D-1") to measure swingweight.  That scale, which he called the "Lorythmic" scale, remains the most popular swingweight measure right up to the present.

Around 1945, Kenneth Smith bought Adams' rights to the swingweight scale, and began experimenting with it himself.  He came to the conclusion that the 14" fulcrum gave a good match for professional golfers, but a 12" fulcrum would produce a better set for the average amateur, which he called the "Official" scale -- even though the industry has never adopted it as official anything.  He was soon producing both kinds of scales.[2]

So, by the mid-1900s, we have three approaches to heft-matching a set of golf clubs:

The 12" so-called Official scale.
The 14" Lorythmic scale (still the most popular).
Moment of inertia (not much used by then, because it was so tedious compared with a swingweight scale).
The major difference among them is the amount by which the clubhead gets lighter as the club gets longer. Smith believed that the average golfer couldn't handle light long irons and woods, hence his proposed (and never really accepted) change in fulcrum placement.

For example, consider a heft-matched set in each of the systems, using the standard club lengths from the late 1900s (35.5" for a 9-iron and 43" for a driver).  Let's choose a common weight for the 9-iron head, and see what the driver head would weigh in a matched set.

https://tutelman.com/golf/design/swingwt1.php

Edited March 14 by BREWMASTER95060
REMOVE DEAD LINKS

[BREWMASTER95060]

weight distribution
swing weight
total weight
moi

 

 

 

[BREWMASTER95060]

funny.
I am sure I could not even lift 1 of these.

[BREWMASTER95060]

why the big grips?

[Stuart_G]

On 9/24/2021 at 9:54 AM, Billfitz said:

More mass on the club head puts more energy into the ball for more distance.

 

That's really not a very good reason for most.   People will generally get way more ball speed by trying to adjust the head weight to optimize the swing speed and face impact location/consistency than they would by trying to get that balls speed from more head mass.

 

Edited September 26, 2021 by Stuart_G

[joostin]

3 hours ago, BREWMASTER95060 said:

funny.
I am sure I could not even lift 1 of these.

Pretty sure those 2 coal digging right hands above can lol

[Billfitz]

3 hours ago, Stuart_G said:

 

 People will generally get way more ball speed by trying to adjust the head weight to optimize the swing speed and face impact location/consistency than they would by trying to get that balls speed from more head mass.

 

That's true for me. In addition to as light an overall mass as possible I have to do other things to keep my club head speed up, like a lot more hip rotation than I ever used or needed forty years and forty pounds ago. Guys like Bryson, Jon and Brooks don't have to be concerned with that.  I guarantee that Professor DeChambeau knows exactly the right combination of club head speed and mass that gives him the best result. 

[BREWMASTER95060]

2 hours ago, joostin said:

Pretty sure those 2 coal digging right hands above can lol

 

Large palms 
 

Edited September 26, 2021 by BREWMASTER95060

[teddyironboy]

given the same weight, a counterweighted club should swing faster right?

[Stuart_G]

4 hours ago, teddyironboy said:

given the same weight, a counterweighted club should swing faster right?

 

Not necessarily.

 

[joostin]

7 hours ago, teddyironboy said:

given the same weight, a counterweighted club should swing faster right?

Depends how you get along with the feel of each club.  Technically the counterweighted one would have a little lower MOI and SW as the club's center of mass would be a little closer towards the grip.  But it's only really "counterweighted" in relation to the SW scale's fulcrum, not in relation to the hands in the swing.

 

Btw a true counterweight on a golf club would be on the other side of the center of rotation of the swing, which constantly changes as shown below, but would be well past the other side of our hands.  We don't really have that unless maybe you choke up a lot, like a foot+, and have a lot of weight at the butt of the grip.

[joostin]

Didn't want to kill this other thread even further:

, so I'll put my 2 cents in my own thread... which I know is not going to change people's minds on feeling balance or a swingweight number.

 

As an engineer who's done too many of the balance equations below and spent too much time making my own swingweight calculators, the swingweight scale is only this:  The amount of torque (moment, force * distance, N-m, lb-ft, oz-in) needed to prevent a club from dropping head down when sitting on a pivot point 14" from the butt, calibrated to a letter and number system.

 

 

1 swingweight point = 1.75 oz-in (.009 lb-ft of torque).  D0 = 213.5 oz-in (1.112 lb-ft) of torque which technically you can feel.  Balance though?

 

Balance needs 2 sides to equal each other.  That's easy on a scale with a pivot point.  Holding a club at the grip end?  To prevent the club and person from falling over, it requires a little shift in bodyweight and a moment (torque) applied by the hands.  Yes, you can feel the amount of weight you're lifting and the amount of torque you apply to a club, "balancing" the torque created by the clubs mass * gravity * distance from the balance point to the hands.  Maybe that's what "feeling the balance" means???

 

"Feeling a club's balance" - I can't explain what that is with physics other that the last paragraph. 

[chipa]

I'm an engineer and build my own clubs but don't measure swingweight, most components (even my DCI 990B heads) are set up for D2 at the standard length, which is fine for my irons but I prefer a little heavier with the woods. I also use lighter grips than standard 44-48 grams, this seems to make the head feel a little heavier.

 

As far as my fairway woods go, most shafts are 65 grams and would be less after trimming and feel too light so I usually add weight to the butt end as well as the head. My 7 wood has 20 grams in the butt end for a total weight of 80 grams, plus an additional 4 grams of lead tape on the head. It feels great. 

 

As my woods get longer I add less backweight. My 4 wood has 15 grams in the butt end for a total weight of 75 grams plus about 3 grams of lead tape on the head.

 

I am putting together a 2004 BB 360 cc driver head at 200g. The shaft will be about 63 grams trimmed with no backweight as I plan on making this 46" so it will feel heavier in spite of the light weight.

[WristySwing]

The amount of fits I used to do where after the fact someone would say "okay great, let's go for them, but it has to be D2, D2 is my swingweight".  I would then reply that I need to measure the test club and see what it came out to be because this clearly had the best results.  A lot of the times people play better with a higher SW than they think they actually need.  The reason for this is, all else equal, it will soften the flex of the shaft just enough and it also gives the player a better sensation of the shaft loading and unloading through impact along with allowing them to feel where the head is a bit better through their swing.

I would then measure said club, "well, looks like we are at D3.5.  I say we build them up for you to this spec because this is what had heads and shoulders better results."  Gee...I dunno, my club builder buddy of mine said that I need a D2.  *sigh*

Edited October 2, 2021 by WristySwing

[Stuart_G]

38 minutes ago, joostin said:

 

"Feeling a club's balance" - I can't explain what that is with physics other that the last paragraph. 

 

That's a starting point - but it's really only looking at the statics.   Going from statics to dynamics is quite a bit more complex - especially considering the complexity of the swing as a motion to move the club a certain way.

Edited October 2, 2021 by Stuart_G

[Fairway14]

On 9/19/2021 at 8:16 AM, joostin said:

"Not sure why it doesn't feel right, it's D3..."

 

Just having some fun with the counterbalancing topic complete with a meme.  Look, to each his/her own - if it works for you, do what you gotta do... get the ball to the hole with your preffered tools and methods.  But the swingweight scale was not designed for hitting a swingweight number by manipulating grip weight. 

 

The problem with "fooling the swing weights scale" comments, usually made by club repair or club builder shop employees, is that the outrageous examples provided (such as a 100 pound golf club) are not relevant to an actual golf club. And neither is taking  dollar bill out of the wallet and telling customers "a swing weight point is the same as a dollar bill, can you feel a dollar bill?" .

The swing weight scale was designed to measure the dynamic feel of a club when swung. Obviously , no one is going to swing a 100 pound golf club so that example of fooling the swing weight scale is irrelevant, Whether a player can swing a club and ascertain as little as a one swing weight point difference is dependent on the player, but it's unprofessional for a club builder to disregard swing weight because he personally does not believe swing weight changes to club (s) affect his own shot making.

 Some players find that changing grip weight significantly affects the balance/feel of the club when swung, others do not. When a club's shaft length is shortened by .5" or an inch or more some players notice a significant change to the club's balance/feel when swung, but others do not.

Some players shoot 65, other players shoot 95. There are all kinds of players of a wide range of skill levels , so different opinions about the balance of clubs and how a club feels when swung are to be expected. The swing weight scale is simply a tool which provides a measurement of the feel/balance of a club when it is swung.

[jomatty]

It is fun to see this thread from so long ago pop back up.  

[joostin]

2 hours ago, Stuart_G said:

 

That's a starting point - but it's really only looking at the statics.   Going from statics to dynamics is quite a bit more complex - especially considering the complexity of the swing as a motion to move the club a certain way.

Absolutely.  And like you said in another post, nowhere in the swing is the center of rotation at a 14" point inside the butt of the club (maybe in a waggle), like the black and white swing picture above shows.

[joostin]

2 hours ago, Fairway14 said:

no one is going to swing a 100 pound golf club so that example of fooling the swing weight scale is irrelevant,

Obviously.  It's a meme.  But the same "balancing" thing is happening at a lesser extent. 

2 hours ago, Fairway14 said:

but it's unprofessional for a club builder to disregard swing weight because he personally does not believe swing weight changes to club (s) affect his own shot making.

No one's really denying the usefulness of the SW scale in sets or two clubs of like build, rather the limitation or misuse of it in relation to its intention, as the patent describes.

 

2 hours ago, Fairway14 said:

Some players find that changing grip weight significantly affects the balance/feel of the club when swung, others do not. When a club's shaft length is shortened by .5" or an inch or more some players notice a significant change to the club's balance/feel when swung, but others do not.

Some players shoot 65, other players shoot 95. There are all kinds of players of a wide range of skill levels , so different opinions about the balance of clubs and how a club feels when swung are to be expected.

I think we all agree here.  Everyone's feel is individual and what matters.  I don't care if the SW scale's number indicates that to you or not as long as your tools allow you to get to the hole as best possible with your abilities.  *Maybe the SW number is perceived as an absolute must for some, maybe not for others.*

 

Again, I made my own swingweight calculator - down to a decimal point!  I obviously don't disregard it, but I take it for what it is, and am flexible when a club feels right even if it doesn't hit the number I thought it should be.  I started building my own clubs intending to match all swingweights down to the decimal, but they are all over the map now because of what works for me with feel & performance.  And despite the original OCD tendencies, that's fine!

[Fairway14]

37 minutes ago, joostin said:

 

No one's really denying the usefulness of the SW scale in sets or two clubs of like build, rather the limitation or misuse of it in relation to its intention, as the patent describes.

 

 

 

As I see it, the most common harm done by club repair-build shops is when the consumer wants to have heavier weight grips installed and is told by the shop employee "don't worry about swing weight, extra weight at the grip end is held within the hands so it does not effect the balance or feel of the club, you'll be fine". Another common (potential) problem is when repair shop employee  suggests that reducing driver shaft length by an inch or two may help improve the customer's driver shots. Too often the employee proclaims "don't worry about swing weight, just go hit the shorter driver and see how you like it".  

So, in the above cases consumers are walking out of repair-build shops with C8 swing weight iron sets and C7 drivers. These are out of balance clubs which make the game harder than need be.