NF4 Shaft Fitting & Spine Alignment

• If you would like to improve your golf then you need clubs designed to fit you and make it easier for you to strike the ball more sweetly. We make clubs with the latest in shaft matching & spine alignment with NF4 Shaft Deflection Technology. To make a set of clubs that feel & play better with more consistency, and help you gain more confidence with every shot.
• Shaft matching applies techniques for matching a single or sets of shafts that follow the well established methods used by club makers for years when matching shafts with a frequency meter. However, shaft matching on the NF4 is based on deflection not frequency.
• The industry "buzz" is that shaft manufacturers themselves use deflection in their design and quality control when making shafts.
• The NF4 is very accurate tool that greatly eases the effort necessary to match a set of shafts. The NF4 has a digital scale which reads the shaft deflection in Kg’s. The shaft is put into a pre-load position and the digital scale set to 0 Kg’s and then the shaft tip is loaded to a known calibrated distance, from which we can then calculate the flex of the shaft, and then makes it possible to tip trim a set of shafts and match them very accurately to the equivalent range of +/- 1-CPM using the NF4 to take all the necessary reading to two decimal places in Kg’s.
• This greatly improves consistency and the feel of the finished clubs, which then gives the player much more confidence when playing a round of golf.
• The NF4 is also designed to accurately measure a shaft to precisely locate the shaft's inconsistencies in wall thickness, straightness, roundness and material. For simplistic terms, this area is referred to as the 'spine' of the shaft. Which can be found on graphite shafts as well as steel shafts.
• Basically, every shaft will want to flex on its spine! So ultimately we want to find a shaft's spine so that we know exactly where the shaft is going to flex! Why is this so important? Well, if we don't find the spine of a shaft, then we just fit the shaft to the head in the normal way and hope for the best! Now we are not saying that a club won't work assembled this way, but we are saying that it is best if we take this variable out of the equation - and find the spine - so that we can install the shaft in a club head in a squared or neutral position so we know without a shadow-of-a-doubt, that the shaft will want to flex properly left-and-right (as we swing a club) and NOT up-and-down! Why would we want a shaft to flex up-and-down when we are trying to swing it left-to-right or right-to-left?. So, by decreasing the shaft's movement in directions other than the final swing plane (left-and-right), we, as club makers, can reduce shaft induced mis-hits and stabalise torsion stiffness for more distance, accuracy and better feel.
• All golfers put a bending force on the shaft at some point during the downswing. If the spine effect is moderate to severe in the shaft, when the shaft bends in response to the golfer's swing force, the direction of bending of the shaft can move off the direction of bending, thus shifting the position of the club and clubface. This can then cause the golfer to hit the ball more off-center than their swing might have otherwise ordained.
• Chances are that your clubs are not "Shaft Aligned", but then again virtually every assembled club including the big brand names clubs are not "Shaft Aligned", reason being that it consumes too much time in the manufacturing process which results in a higher cost to the shaft manufacturer but it is vitally important in helping you play better golf.
• Have you noticed that sometimes you will have a "favourite" club in a set of clubs with the exact same head, shaft and grip, that you just seem to hit better and more consistently than the others? This is most likely due to the fact that the spine in that club happens by chance to be correctly aligned in the club. The opposite is probably true for the club in the set that you can't seem to hit well at all, you worked so hard on the range, developing a swing that's reliable, consistent and repeatable. Shouldn't your equipment follow the same stringent standards?
• An independent study on spine alignment was undertaken by, Golf Science Consultants, Inc. This study was performed by J.Howard Butler, President of Golf Science Consultants, Inc. A former Vice-President of Shaft Technology at True Temper.
  Preliminary test results clearly indicate that when a golfers shaft is properly aligned the club becomes more stable, thus improving the impact repeatability (hitting the sweet spot more often)
• In all golfers tested impact repeatability improved from 14 to 51% when changing from non-aligned to spine aligned clubs.
  In a separate article, Golf Digest reported on tests conducted by Dr.P.C. Chou of the Drexel University Ballistics Research Center, which revealed that a player loses about six yards for every two-tenths 2/10 of an inch that they miss the sweet spot.
  Nearly 80 Tour Pro's have spine aligned their clubs.

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