My First Set

[spike1212]

Being winter here in the Northeast, I was getting a little itchy for any form of golf activity, and decided it was time to try graphite shafts in my irons: 54 y.o. mid handicap, slow swing speed, vastly overweight....you get the picture.

 

Since I had a few sets of older irons sitting around I decided to buy the shafts and do the job myself. Knowing nothing about clubmaking, I have spent a considerable amount of time over the last few weeks reading anything and everything I could find; that includes alot of time in these forums which is invaluable.

 

Without getting too involved at first, I settled on a set of Aldila VSProto 85 gram regular flex 3-PW. The irons I chose to swap out are Mizuno MX-19, a set I bought a few years back and never got to know very well before I switched to AP1s (which I am very happy with and on my second set). But this winter I started to hit the Mizunos again and I think its a good club.

 

The actual shaft pulling, cutting, assembly, etc is fairly simple stuff. But the more I read, the more I got intrigued by two things: spine alignment and swingweight. I used a swingweight "calculator" to try to define the clubs before I pulled them and got numbers in the C7 to C8 range. I couldnt find any old specs but I'm guessing that Mizuno would have built these in the D1-D3 range. I use a Lamkin Crossline midsize which is a very heavy grip. I could have done a full disassembly and weighing and measuring of what I had, but I decided against this because I was just going to build them to what I wanted, and this whole exercise was experimental anyway. I like a feel of heft in the club, so I decided on a D3 target.

 

 

As to the spine alignment, I started out by building a little two bearing tube and used the 3 bearing method to see what I had. I could certainly discern a sweet spot in the shaft but its all somewhat vague. The one thing I have noticed about these shafts (and other Aldila shafts I have bought) is that they appear to have been marked with white pencil in the butt end at the factory; all the labels were aligned with this white mark, but the curious thing was that all the shafts snapped to this position in the bearing tube under load. Certainly Aldila is not spining the shafts? So I decided to try FLO alignment. The results of that were that I was finding a FLO orientaion near, but not quite at, the factory white pencil mark. I rotated the shafts thru a rough 360 rotation and my best FLO location was in that area. I am assumimg it is an N1 location.

 

So I got everything all marked, did my math for swingweights and figured out what I needed to do for extra tip weighting to get to my D3. (One thing I ended up having to do was ream out the hosels; the shafts ordered were .355 but what was sent was .370; rather that send them back I decided to ream the hosels; this took all of 20 minutes for all 8 clubs and there is plenty of meat there). I glued eveything up yesterday and installed grips and re-weighed today.

 

I enjoyed the process: It was more intellectual than physical and it gave me some new toys to play with. I was hoping to hit a few today but it was blowing 40 knots, so I'm not sure what Ive got. I'm happy with the way they turned out, although I think my ferrule turning and finishing needs some refinement.

 

Pic attached.

[Stuck in the rough]

They came out great.... I am in a similar process now of building own for first time. We shall see. Great work!

[Nandy14]

Looks great

[Bodee]

Very nice!!!!!! You should be proud!!

[jonwil]

Very interesting reading about your project. What did you conclude about the difference in the factory white mark and your own measurements?

[spike1212]

[quote name='jonwil' timestamp='1329654236' post='4322195']
Very interesting reading about your project. What did you conclude about the difference in the factory white mark and your own measurements?
[/quote]


I'm not sure I can conclude anything:

Either,

1) The shafts had been spined;

2) My methods are suspect; or,

3) That is one crazy co-incidence



I've since sold those irons (for dirt cheap I might add) and put another set of the same shafts (the original .355 TT I ordered) into my 08 AP1s. These shafts came in with similiar factory marks and label alignments, but these spined and flo'd in completely different locations. So I'm not sure what it means. I'm going to keep these irons for a bit and compare to my 710 AP1s in steel to see how the whole graphite thing works for me.

To complicate matters, today I assembled a set of 710 AP2 heads I picked up on this site in some NS 950GH shafts. I should be hitting these later this week.

[j.lapp]

so did you already have all the tools needed? or did you go get those, set up a club building shop area, and then do it?

[spike1212]

[quote name='j.lapp' timestamp='1329964705' post='4355011']
so did you already have all the tools needed? or did you go get those, set up a club building shop area, and then do it?
[/quote]


I had nothing.


The first thing I bought was a shaft puller. This serves as a nice bench clamp also for other tasks. I also bought a bunch of other devices and items:


Ferrule depth gauge.....a bit of a waste. Easier to set ferrules with actual club head

Ferrule splitter....I only use it on graphite so I dont take a digger with a razor knife; otherwise razor knife works well for steel.

3 bearing spine finder.....I built this myself

Drill chuck and Laser pen for FLO alignment

On the first set I relied on on-line swingweight calculators/estimators for this task.....mistake. No substitute for an actual SW scale which I've since purchased...should have done it earlier on.

Then a small outlay for inventory of tip weights, ferrules, epoxy, grip tape etc.


As far as other tools, I already had what was necessary: I build composite (carbon/graphite) boats for a living so I'm well stocked with any manner of tools of destruction and have plenty of shop space