Club Ho'ing

Besides right after the fairways and greens have been aerated, I suspect that Pilgrim's Oak is always in about the best condition in the region amongst public courses. Most all of the southern Pennsylvania courses our group plays are in better condition and less expensive than the ones here in Maryland. No, for ten bucks I didn't go wrong. Hell, the local Play It Again Sports will give me twenty bucks for that wedge. So long as I don't reshaft it with a messed up ferrule and scorch marks on the hosel. A Mongrel club-making trademark.

I'm almost at 60 days with no club ho'ing. I'm ready for my 60-day chip. I'll be giving a little speech on Oct. 27th. Hope all of you can attend.

With that being said, here are a few sets of irons that I thought of purchasing but didn't":

Titleist ZB irons with Nippon 970 S Shafts. Nice looking but 10 yards shorter than normal in the simulator.

Ping G25 irons. These are long. I don't like the offset. My Taylormade Tour Burners are more attractive.

Rife Two-Bar Blade putter for $29. Man this thing is ugly but it sure putts good. It has those two round bars on it. Hence the name two bar.

Cobra ZL Encore Driver for $79. Too funny looking.

Umbrella golf club cover for $9. I should have bought it. Plus, it wouldn't have counted as a true club ho'.

        

GOFD, was that Rife 2 Bar the mallet or hybrid? I use the mallet version, the original I suspect, and have been about lights-out (for me, anyway) in the last two rounds I played with it. All I did was to switch to the Left Hand Low stroke and both my direction and, more importantly, distance control skyrocketed. No three-putts in two rounds is unheard of for me.

The Ghost of FD wrote:I'm almost at 60 days with no club ho'ing.  I'm ready for my 60-day chip.  I'll be giving a little speech on Oct. 27th.  Hope all of you can attend.

With that being said, here are a few sets of irons that I thought of purchasing but didn't":

Titleist ZB irons with Nippon 970 S Shafts.  Nice looking but 10 yards shorter than normal in the simulator.  

Ping G25 irons.  These are long.  I don't like the offset.  My Taylormade Tour Burners are more attractive.  

Rife Two-Bar Blade putter for $29.  Man this thing is ugly but it sure putts good.  It has those two round bars on it.  Hence the name two bar.  

Cobra ZL Encore Driver for $79.  Too funny looking.  

Umbrella golf club cover for $9.   I should have bought it.  Plus, it wouldn't have counted as a true club ho'.  

        

Based on the philosophy of "reincarnation" , FD could not be dead and come back as ghost of FD. It's a belief that male FD will reincarnate as a female FD

Based on hard evidence, he is certainly alive and his rapier wit is still honed. To wit, go over to the Old Place and check out his latest review of the Titleist AP 2 irons. Its all there. Classic.

Pky6471 wrote:

The Ghost of FD wrote:I'm almost at 60 days with no club ho'ing.  I'm ready for my 60-day chip.  I'll be giving a little speech on Oct. 27th.  Hope all of you can attend.

With that being said, here are a few sets of irons that I thought of purchasing but didn't":

Titleist ZB irons with Nippon 970 S Shafts.  Nice looking but 10 yards shorter than normal in the simulator.  

Ping G25 irons.  These are long.  I don't like the offset.  My Taylormade Tour Burners are more attractive.  

Rife Two-Bar Blade putter for $29.  Man this thing is ugly but it sure putts good.  It has those two round bars on it.  Hence the name two bar.  

Cobra ZL Encore Driver for $79.  Too funny looking.  

Umbrella golf club cover for $9.   I should have bought it.  Plus, it wouldn't have counted as a true club ho'.  

        

Based on the philosophy of "reincarnation" , FD could not be dead and come back as ghost of FD. It's a belief that male FD will reincarnate as a female FD

based on that, shouldn't he reincarnate as a male FD?  

Big Dave wrote:based on that, shouldn't he reincarnate as a male FD?   

No, Ghost of FD does not count as reincarnation. When FD is gone, his spirit will float around for 49 days a a ghost on this earth then disappear... He would reincarnate as a female FD who plays lady shaft

Just picked up a lightly used sets of Adams a12 forged irons on KBS tour fst black shafts... :-) $180. At Golf Galaxy in the bin.

Well, I'm ready to go to Golf Galaxy today after work. I've got the $25 off for any purchase over $100 coupon, along with my $100 gift certificate.

The only problem is that I really don't need anything other than a putter and GG is not the best place for used putters.

I'm giddy.

If you don't have one already, you might want to try one of those really thick grips on one of your putters that you like but are not quite consistent enough with. It might seal the deal and save you some scratch.

After all the hype I've read about Mizzy blades, I ho'd a set of MP68's for $150. KBS shafts with new Lambkin grips. The faces were a bit worn in a spot about the size of a quarter, but remembering Mongerl's words of wisdom, "you'll get better spin off them." I walked out with them.

Now the verdict is in.

For me....they are totally un-hittable. Of to the right, off to the right, off to the right. Pick up my X-20, straight every time. MP-68, of to the right. That one out of ten hit does feel like a hot knife thru butter, but the other 9 swings are terrible.

So, I tried them out and they are not for me.

I should never have passed up that used set of MP57's..........  

Not surprising. KBS shafts seem to be a bit counter-weighted. That is, more weight in the butt end than other steel iron shafts. I recently bought a used Mizuno MP-T 51* wedge that had a KBS shaft in it. The price was about what I would pay for just the head so I figured I'd give the KBS a chance. It failed big time and I ended up putting a Dynalite Gold R300 8 iron shaft in it and now it is very playable. So you might not want to blame the clubheads but look towards the shafts as the culprits. That and have the lie angles and lofts checked. If you have the budget and will to get these irons dialed in for you, they might just work fine.

Mongrel wrote:Not surprising. KBS shafts seem to be a bit counter-weighted. That is, more weight in the butt end than other steel iron shafts. I recently bought a used Mizuno MP-T 51* wedge that had a KBS shaft in it. The price was about what I would pay for just the head so I figured I'd give the KBS a chance. It failed big time and I ended up putting a Dynalite Gold R300 8 iron shaft in it and now it is very playable. So you might not want to blame the clubheads but look towards the shafts as the culprits. That and have the lie angles and lofts checked. If you have the budget and will to get these irons dialed in for you, they might just work fine.

Nah. I'm bringing them home with me next month. Got someone in my summer league that will take them.
The X20's are just fine for my game and anyway, in a couple years when I sell the house up north, I'll be taking my gamers down here. So i"ll have my 1st and 2nd sets. At my level, do I really need any more?

Man, I really shoulda bought those MP57's.

jmtbkr wrote:

Mongrel wrote:Not surprising. KBS shafts seem to be a bit counter-weighted. That is, more weight in the butt end than other steel iron shafts. I recently bought a used Mizuno MP-T 51* wedge that had a KBS shaft in it. The price was about what I would pay for just the head so I figured I'd give the KBS a chance. It failed big time and I ended up putting a Dynalite Gold R300 8 iron shaft in it and now it is very playable. So you might not want to blame the clubheads but look towards the shafts as the culprits. That and have the lie angles and lofts checked. If you have the budget and will to get these irons dialed in for you, they might just work fine.

Nah. I'm bringing them home with me next month. Got someone in my summer league that will take them.
The X20's are just fine for my game and anyway, in a couple years when I sell the house up north, I'll be taking my gamers down here. So i"ll have my 1st and 2nd sets. At my level, do I really need any more?

Man, I really shoulda bought those MP57's.

I've experienced the exact same thing with Mizuno MP irons. I'd say 50% of the shots feel great and the other 50% are horrible. Missed shots lose tons of distance.

I tell you guys, if you want a cavity back iron with little offset, a great look and really good feel you should try the Taylormade Tour Burner irons with the stock stiff steel shaft. I think it's called the T105 steel shaft. This iron came out in 2006 or 2007. It's the best iron I've played. Great distance.

Hope everyone's doing good? Haven't played golf in ages it seems, long sh!t winter.
My shops been super busy, haven't had a break since the potholes are unreal everywhere.
Polar vortex!!!
I've hit some in the yard for the last couple weeks, found around 50 balls under the snowmelt. Almost gone, except for a dusting this morning. Fuk
I don't think I've hoed much for awhile? Maybe a half a dozen more wrap grips from Pure, oh and a lady's pro golfer shaft I'm going to try in my 10.5 R9 head, some stiff tp motore shaft that's 55 grams. I don't think it will kick the tipped reg flex motore 75 out of the 8.5 head.
Ordered a 190 balls from someone on the west coast, that can find them.
I did hoe a crap load of nice clothing, and shoes, and attire in general for some fuckin reason, I suppose due to a dryer malfunction, were it chewed my underwear, and everything in general nice up, put holes in it.

You know I think stupid ass FD changed my avatar back from the fat John Daly I had!!

I don't think FD would do that. He hasn't been around too often lately. I had a JD for awhile but I am totally tired of him now that he can't compete anymore on the big tour. I doubt that if he suddenly turned 50 in some sort of time warp that he could compete on the senior tour either.

Dropped into Golf somethin' somethin' this weekend and all of last years demo's were in the used rack.  I tried a few drivers and 3 woods.  They had a i25 with the stock fuji shaft I liked.  It looked like new and was under $200.  But I walked out with a Titleist 913F 3W with the Diamana S+ 72 (blue board).  paid $130 and it looks brand new.  We'll see about the driver.  I'll probably go back and try it against my driver.

My driver swing speed has slowed a bit over the last 5 years.  I'm now swinging between 109 and 112 mph. I was a115-118 mph and could crank it up above 120 mph if I really had a go at it.  I'm not sure if it's from getting older of just swing changes.  I'm a ton more accurate than I was 5 years ago. I think I'm just a bit more grounded now than I was then.

Poe4soul wrote:Dropped into Golf somethin' somethin' this weekend and all of last years demo's were in the used rack.  I tried a few drivers and 3 woods.  They had a i25 with the stock fuji shaft I liked.  It looked like new and was under $200.  But I walked out with a Titleist 913F 3W with the Diamana S+ 72 (blue board).  paid $130 and it looks brand new.  We'll see about the driver.  I'll probably go back and try it against my driver.

My driver swing speed has slowed a bit over the last 5 years.  I'm now swinging between 109 and 112 mph. I was a115-118 mph and could crank it up above 120 mph if I really had a go at it.  I'm not sure if it's from getting older of just swing changes.  I'm a ton more accurate than I was 5 years ago. I think I'm just a bit more grounded now than I was then.

I've read somewhere that we drop 5mph every year as we get older. I don't think it's far fetched as I get older (62 and 4 months now). I was at Golf Smith today looking for a big fat a$$ Fatso-85 Super Stroke grip, while there, I tried most new (adjustable headed) driver, but I don't think they are any better than my current Cally Diablo Edge Tour driver... anyway, my SS is 80-82 max with 14-16 launch angle. My swing SUCKS big time in terms of speed

I'm well past giving a flying fuck what my driver swing speed is according to the computer machines in the golf stores. Hell, my eyes are so bad that I can't even see a wedge shot land 100 yards away anymore. I just catch a glimpse of the ball off driver so I go by feel and the little tell-tails on the face of the driver left by the red sharpie dots I put on my balls to tell about how far it went and in what general direction. This season I've been driving the ball about 10-30 yards past most of the old guys (60+) in my club. I can get within 10-20 yards of the 40-50 year olds and outdrive several of them every time and get within 20-40 yards of the few young guns with 'caps in the 5-8 range. We all play from the same tees so I can hang in there.

Bottom line is that I'm hitting driver as far as I did from when I started in the '50's to about when I got back into the game and played the original Taylormade metal wood-- the iconic 9* Pittsburgh Persimmon. Of course 40-70 yards of distance with that club was roll-out. 35 years later I can carry my 9.5* Titleist DComp 10-30 yards farther. Shaft and ball technologies are wonderful things.

Mongrel wrote:

Bottom line is that I'm hitting driver as far as I did from when I started in the '50's to about when I got back into the game and played the original Taylormade metal wood-- the iconic 9* Pittsburgh Persimmon. Of course 40-70 yards of distance with that club was roll-out. 35 years later I can carry my 9.5* Titleist DComp 10-30 yards farther. Shaft and ball technologies are wonderful things.

The classic (or at least original) Pittsburgh Persimmon driver was the 12° version, but if you say it was the macho 9° model that became iconic, I have no data with which to argue. Nine degrees were a non-starter for me when I was in my absolute physical prime playing to a seven.

I loved those early TMs because that first series of fairway woods had generous loft and flat lie angles--both features which have traditionally worked for me.

Metalwood heads require custom-made tooling dies for total customization, and thus fully custom models don't exist in familiar markets. However, Louisville Golf furnishes persimmon fairways with total customization for $50 over standard--still pricy, but a far cry from forty grand to have a custom die or mold made and used. My Louisville Niblicks are specked very close to that first series of TMs...I just don't understand why fairway woods use the traditional name for well lofted short irons, niblick.

These woods have a very low center of gravity, similar to the old Little Slammer from Oz. That's perhaps too low for most viewers of these pages, but with flexibility issues limiting me to little over a half swing these days, it all works out well for me. Louisville also offers conventional style persimmon woods, but seem to have discontinued their laminated maple models. In glory days, I favored persimmon drivers and laminated fairways.

There was a driver with a higher loft than 9*. I believe it may have been called "fairway driver". If you had enough clubhead speed, it wasn't all that difficult to get the ball in the air with the 9. A couple of years after the P-P intro, Taylor offered it with an optional graphite shaft. I played a round of golf in the mid 1980's with the former publisher of a major southern daily paper who had been kidnapped by a radical group not too long before. He was a good player and had one of those graphite P-P 9* drivers. He let me hit it on the 15th hole of our club and I put a gentle swing on it and drew it about 260 out on the left side of the fairway and had a PW in to the green where it would usually be a 5 or 6 iron since it was mostly uphill.

Now my latest hat-tip to the golfing days of yore was the installation of a Dynamic Gold X100 shaft into a Titleist 909D3 10.5* head cut to play 43.75". I just got back from the range and hit maybe 40 balls with it. What a solid feeling club. I took a black Sharpie and covered the middle of the clubface with indelible black Sharpie juice so I could see the impacts. None of the 40 balls were off dead center by more than a third of an inch. And with the exception of one worm burner on my second try with it, the rest all went out on a higher trajectory than when it had its stock graphite shaft in it. Damn.

IMO... there is a misconception (for a lack of a better word) about the loft of a driver's head., therefore it's has been misused. I played with a guy whose ball's trajectory was more like 7-8* lofted driver, Jokingly that's what I told him until he showed me his 13* Ping driver. For my SS, I have to play 9.5* driver for the best trajectory... It's all about the "angle of attack" (assuming everything else is constant) , some shaft could help airborne a ball quicker, for my swing it's the Aldila NV Green 65-g S-flex shaft. My T's height is almost at the top of driver's head, so IMO we have to experiment it for our swing. My 13* 3W cleveland launcher arrived, it's almost new as it was introduced back in 2002. I will test it at the range tomorrow for a charity tourney on Sunnday which is about 1-hr away from Mongrel's home. It would be used for T-off only when needed, I would not dare to hit it off a fairway , unless a ball is on an uphill slope

My swing sucks

Degrees of driver loft isn't everything. Some driver heads are weighted to promote higher or lower launches despite the loft numbers on their soles. For example, the new Taylor SLDR's that have the ad campaign entitled "Loft Up" Have weighting close to the clubfaces so that they launch lower at higher lofts than heads with weighting low and in the rear. This is why you might hit an 8.5* head with low rear weighting as high or higher than a 12* SLDR with the weighting close to the clubface. Shaft characteristics also affect your launch and ball height. This afternoon I took my 909D3 with the newly installed True Temper X100 steel shaft out to the muni range to give it a go. Well, it felt really solid and I was hitting the ball higher than I did when it had the stock made for Titleist stiff VooDoo in it. Now I don't know how far they were going because I can't see that far but the apexes seemed to be about the same distance.

Since I am still on the steel shaft jag, I also stopped in to the golf equipment store and bought a True Temper TX90 .335" driver shaft. This is a stepped steel pole that weighs 109 grams uncut versus the DG X100's 124 grams. I just epoxied it into my 9.5* 905R head at full bore-through depth. When I trim the butt, the shaft should be right around 100 grams or slightly less. This could be a killer anti-left combo. Full report to follow. Mongrel out.

Steel shafted Tit drivers update report-- Just got back from a different range than the one I went to yesterday. Today's range is right next to the Chesapeake Bay at a County-owned muni. It faces north so I can see the balls fly a lot better. I fashioned a higher teeing arrangement on the mat by taking one of my long plastic tees and sticking its end in a used cigarette filter. This gave me a ball height with about half the ball above the top of the driver head which is about perfect for my preferred driver ball position of an inch or three in front of the big toe of my left foot at address. Since I went in the middle of the afternoon, most tees were empty and I found a bucket with about 20 non-range balls beside the ball machine that one of the guys probably picked out so I took that along with the small bucket of yellow range balls.

Now I had two steel shafted Tits. The 909D2 with the DG X100 that I hit yesterday and the 905R 9.5* with the True Temper TX 90 stiff that I put together yesterday evening. Both play at 43.5". The 909D3 weighs 369 grams and swingweights at D2. The 905R weighs 357 grams and plays just a shade under D2. Both shafts are untipped but the 909 is a blind bore so the shaft tip is only in about 1.625" or so. The 905R is a bore-through and I installed the TX 90 so that the tip did not stick out of the sole hole--about 3.25" total.

The two clubs have different shafts both in weight and flex and the heads are different. The 909D3 sits one half degree open and has a deeper face. The 905R sits square and has a more shallow face. The 909 likes the ball teed about a quarter of an inch higher. I hit about twenty shots with each one with wedge, hybrid and mid iron shots in between each drive so as not to skew results. Both drivers feel solid as hell. With the slightly higher tee than yesterday and the good balls, the 909 was getting them out there with good hang time and an almost flat trajectory with a slight fade unless I really cranked it and then it went about dead straight. The 905R felt like I could swing it a bit faster due to the lighter shaft and overall weight and it too flew in a flat trajectory with more hang time than it had with the several graphite shafts I had in it. I still couldn't see the balls land but the apexes looked a bit longer than with my other graphite shafted drivers. The best part was that I was right on target for all but a couple of shots that I was trying to draw and pulled tham left a bit. Still less left than I typically get with lighter graphite shafts. I fell like I could play with either one right now on any of the courses we play.