Being a Golf Gear Tinkerer

I first learned basic golf club building skills about a decade ago (shout out Keith and Meurig).  My joke was always “if I know how to fix my own clubs, I can break them whenever I want!”  First, please note I’ve never intentionally broken a club and don’t plan to, but I still stand by that statement.  Well, part of being a golf gear tinkerer means you always have random equipment laying around the house, never trust your repeated fittings and data, and are always curious to see what difference a change might make.  The problem with having the least bit of competency in doing your own club work, it’s too easy to act on those thoughts.  Especially when you’ve had a bad day hitting the golf ball.

What’s a Bad Day?

Let me qualify a bad day first.  This could be any day you spend hitting golf balls to some sort of result.  Maybe you just went to the range for an hour.  Maybe you just played 18 holes.  The reality is, you hit golf shots and experienced results.  Well, on one of these particular days, you were unhappy with those results.  If you’re lucky, you even noticed a common struggle that you could “feel” throughout your session.  Sometimes you’re willing to admit that it’s you and your swing.  Other times, you remember that premium set of exotic shafts you recently pulled from a set of irons sitting in a box in your basement.  Obviously you know that the only next plausible option is to totally take apart your golf clubs and rebuild them with a different set of shafts.  That’s a “bad day.”

Ripping Your Clubs Apart

Naturally, the “common sense” fix for the golf gear tinkerer is to go home and tear your clubs apart to try a new setup.  (That set from two years ago that you played well with certainly is not an option…)  I don’t mean “tear them apart at your leisure and rebuild sometime before the next time you play.”  I mean you get home, take your clubs out of your trunk, leave your irons on the workbench in the garage, and go inside and get changed.  Next, you return to the garage and get ripping clubs apart.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done this.  Jon and Tommy will attest to the texts of me proving I wasn’t lying when I said I was tearing my clubs apart when I got home after a shitty round.  Typically what happens next is that I’ve gotten the frustration out after pulling the shafts from my clubs and realized my care level was a lot lower than I thought.  Then it takes me awhile to get back to putting everything back together again.

The Rebuild

Like I said, once I rip the clubs apart, my urgency dies off quickly.  Eventually I go, “welp, I guess if I’m putting these together again, I should do it right.”  This turns into a week-long process.  It ALWAYS goes in this order.  Night 1, take the replacement shafts out to the garage to drill out any old epoxy or weights inside the tip, and prep/clean the tips from old debris.  Night 2 (which could be three nights later), go through the fun process of swing weighting your clubs.  Make sure you write everything down for Night 3.  On Night 3, it’s time to epoxy the heads and shafts together.  Good thing you kept notes from swing weighting so you know what weights to add to every club as you put them together.

At this point you feel like you’ve finally rectified your emotional reaction to having a bad range session or a few blow-up holes.  Oh crap, the new shafts you just tossed in your clubs didn’t have grips on them from before, or if they did, they’re super dry and crusty.  Welcome to Night 4.  This is the night where you head into the garage to cut some grips off, torch off the tape, and regrip your weapons.  This is the most time consuming and boring* part to me, but it’s part of the job.  That said, after getting some grips on your clubs, you’re basically done.

*I will say on a nice summer night with a good beer, this is actually a fairly enjoyable activity.  It’s somewhat therapeutic.  In fact, it’s the odd time where I go, “good thing I took my clubs apart and did this to myself.”

Final Thoughts

Learning how to build my own clubs has been both a blessing and a curse.  Knowing I can so easily blame my gear and try some new combination has enabled me to waste countless hours working on clubs as well as not be accountable for just hitting the ball poorly.  The thing is, I know I’m not alone.  Let’s face it, messing around with all of the toys is half the fun of it so any excuse we have to do it, we’re going to take advantage.  Then when that doesn’t work, the next step is to obviously buy something new and start the process all over again.