Club weight is probably the most important yet most misunderstood specification
consumers have to cope with. The best way to understand weight specs is to use an analogy.
All you really need is a stick, some scotch tape and a roll of nickels to demystify this
specification, once and for all.
Let's suppose you went to your local hardware store and purchased a hardwood dowel
about 48" long and 5/8" in diameter. If you placed this dowel on a kitchen
scale, you'd find it weighs about 4 ounces which, it turns out, is about what a steel golf
shaft weighs for the same length. This weight is called the static weight. If you lifted
this dowel you'd find it's very light and if you swung it with either or both hands,
you'd be able to really whip it around with almost no effort. It's light.
Now suppose you scavenged around a construction site and found yourself a 5/8"
diameter steel concrete reinforcing bar. At 48" length this weighs (static weight)
almost 5 pounds (80 ounces). We both know that if you took this bar in either or both
hands and tried to swing it that it would take a much greater exertion on your part and
you couldn't 'whip it around' like the wooden dowel. It's heavy.
The main point is this - you can swing a lighter object faster than a heavier object.
The distance a golf ball is hit depends greatly an how fast the clubhhead is going when it
impacts the ball. Faster means more distance. It is for this reason that club builders
have sought lighter weight materials for years. If you can use materials like aluminum,
graphite, wood, lighter weight steel, or titanium to reduce weight, making sure that it is
durable and doesn't break easily, you have the ingredient for enabling faster swing speeds
which translates to more shot distance. This is particularly important for one club - the
driver. Most people want to maximize the distance they can hit the driver, so changing
from a heavier club to lighter club improves their chance to increase distance. Besides,
swinging a lighter club tends to be less tiring. If you don't believe this go to a driving
range and hit 100 drivers one day and 100 full wedge shots the next days. The wedge weighs
more than the driver and you'll be more exhausted practicing with it than the driver.
Returning to the dowel, let's tape the roll of nickels to it at one end. It turns out
a roll of nickels weighs about 7 ounces, or the weight of a typical driver head. The
dowel now weighs 11 ounces (4 for the dowell and 7 for the nickels). It doesn't matter
where on the dowel we tape the nickels, either end or in the middle, the static weight is
the same. However, as we'll see next, the 'where' the nickels are taped has a very
significant effect on how the club feels when we are swinging it.
Swingweight
If you picked up the dowel on the end where the nickels were taped and swung it, you'd
find you can still whip it around without much effort. If you did this for hours on end, the
heavier static weight would tire you out quicker than without the nickels but an added 7
ounces isn't like swinging a steel reinforcing bar! Now remove the nickels and retape them
to the center of the dowell, about 24" from the grip end. If you swung it now, it
would 'feel' heavier even though the static weight is the same. In fact, you would not be
able to swing this as fast as before. If you removed the nickels one last time and taped
them to the tip end, a full 48" from where you are gripping the dowel and swung it,
you'd find there is much greater resistance to the swing motion. The dowel may actually
feel heavy, although the static weight has not changed. The reason for this is couched in
some basic physics regarding angular motion which we don't need to get into. What's
important is that that taping the nickels farther down the dowel makes it feel heavier
when swinging it. In other words, the static weight feels heavier when we are swinging
with the weight closer to the tip end. This 'swinging' weight was given a name years ago
and is still known as club 'swingweight', which is a very important club specification.
In essence it's pretty simple - the farther you place a weight from the grip end and
the more that weight weighs, the greater the club swingweight. So, if you bought a driver
that had a short shaft, say 40", compared to a long boy of 50", the 50"
driver would feel much heavier when swinging it. If you wanted the 40" club to have
the same swingweight of the longer club, you could add some weight to the head (taped
nickels would work but you would probably use lead tape). This is why shorter clubs like
irons are heavier (irons are shorter than woods because you have more accuracy control
with shorter clubs and with irons you are more concerned with accuracy than
distance). If you want an iron to feel like and have the same swingweight of the longer
woods, you'll have to make the iron head heavier and that's exactly what clubuilders have
been doing for years. To give all clubs the same feel they have made the shorter irons'
heads heavier. It's also the reason you'll never swing irons as fast as woods because the
added iron head weight means the static clubweight is more and therefore you can't swing
it as fast - remember the steel reinforcing bar.
A difference in the dowel and the golf shaft is that golf shafts are usually tapered
towards the tip end. Why this is so has to do with shaft flex (our next subject). Since
the shaft is tapered it has more material at the thinner end to preserve strength. This
means that the shaft itself has a distribution of weight which has to be considered in
swingweight if you are a club designer or builder.
Different shaft weights and weight distributions are the reason you can't simply ask
your your clubbuilder to replace your older steel shafts for graphite without considering
what it will do to the resultant swingweight. In almost all cases you'll have to make the
clubs longer or add some head weight with the lighter shafts or you will find the clubs
much lighter - possibly unhittable.
Most consumers only need to know what swingweight feels right to them and if it
doesn't, what to do to get it adjusted. About 50 years ago a system was devised to easily
measure swingweights. It is still in use today.
The swingweight scale
Similar to a weighing scale where the units of measurement are pounds or ounces, the
industry came up with a simple measuring scale for club swingweights. The basic idea was
to find some point near the grip of the club so that you can get a relative
feel for weight while the clubhead is in motion. Although there is some controversy as to
exactly where the ''grabbing' point should be the industry has come to accept, call it a
standard, a set of measurement units for swingweight. Light swingweight clubs are
designated with the letter 'A'. B is heavier than A, C is heavier than B, and so on. Most
clubs nowadays fall in a measured swingweight range of from A to E. Since that that only
leaves 6 measures (A is 1, B is 2 etc), the industry decided to create a smaller measure
within each letter designation so A now has A0, A1, .... A9 where A9 is heavier than A8
and so on. B0 is heavier than A9. The good thing about this scaling is that it is accepted
and standardized within the golf industry so that if you bought a set of clubs from a
manufacturer that measured D4, you could measure that swingweight yourself and it would be
D4 on your own scale. It's good to know this because you might buy that perfect $ 3 driver
at a flea market and you can rest assured that its swingweight can be measured and changed
precisely to your liking.
Swingweight guidelines
The swingweight guideline for most women's clubs is in the C8 - D1 range. For men
the range is normally D0 - D6. In the past few years longer clubs have come into vogue
mostly due to the the advent of very lightweight graphite shafts and lighter weight heads.
Some of the shafts now weigh less than 2 ounces which is a significant static weight
reduction for the overall club. With this static weight reduction clubmakers have extended
the length of the club which has potential for added shot distance. These long lightweight
clubs often have swingweights in the E and even F range.
Matching swingweights
Exactly how important is it to have each club in your repetoire feel alike? Well, it's
probably pretty important that each club be within a couple swingweights of each other
because professionals advocate that you should try to swing each club in the bag similarly
and having the same swingweights would certainly facilitate this.
Ralph Maltby of Golfworks Inc., an industry expert component and club designer, showed
that in a blind shootout test that even the pros could not distinguish a 1 swingweight
difference but they could tell the difference in 2. Consequently if you have some clubs
that weigh in at D1 and others D3, it probably isn't going to make too much difference in
feel to you. However, if you you have irons that swingweight at D3 and one lone one that
is a C8, maybe because you tried out a graphite shaft in it and didn't get it
re-swingweighted, you'll know the difference immediately. If it turns out you hit that one
lone club better than the rest, you should change the rest.
