Building golf clubs is as much art as it is science. Physics and precise measurements dictate final specs from a fitting, but getting everything to actually fit together is what separates professional club builders from the wannabes—it’s problem-solving at the highest level.

What separates the great professional builders from the rest is their understanding of how each OEM designs and assembles clubs, and how those components relate to each other—it’s the secret sauce. Whether it be understanding how to weight specific heads, or how to properly shim or sand shafts to get everything to fit as precisely as possible, these are the top club building secrets to hitting exact specs.

Tip weights

Clubhead weights are rarely ever perfect, and because of that, tip weights are needed to get them dialed in. When head weights are bang on, it’s generally because they were handpicked by a boutique component supplier. This doesn’t mean club heads are poor quality, it just shows that OEMs are doing everything they can to help golfers on both ends of the over and under length spectrum get the right clubs. By intentionally having heads be 4-5g under standard length required head weight, builders need to add less weight to get to spec, and when building overlength, it prevents clubs from becoming too heavy.

The only time you will generally find heads that are too heavy is when working with one-piece forged irons meant for the Japanese market. Since those clubs are often built under North American standard length, the club heads are heavier to help keep swing weights in line.

So, the next time you find tip weights in a set you are pulling apart, consider it a good sign that whoever built them took the time to get club head specs correct.

Shaft weights and tipping

In the world of shafts, the higher-end you go the tighter the specs—you truly get what you pay for. The perfect example is True Temper Dynamic Gold Tour Issue X100 shafts. They aren’t any different than standard X100 shafts except for the fact that they go through the extensive process of being weight sorted down to .5g on either side 130 grams. This allows the shafts to play extremely close to the intended flex and allow for easier swing weights and total weight specs to be achieved.

When shafts are within manufacturer tolerance but need to be tweaked, this is where the skill and knowledge of a club builder become invaluable. A quick trim of a 1/4″ can dial in flex to fit in line with the rest of the set. The end goal of a club builder is to make every club feel like your favorite club—and sorting and tipping are a big part of that.

When using parallel shafts, club builders will first weight sort lightest to heaviest to determine the best order to install those shafts into the set—this takes more time but creates a much more balanced set at the completion of the build. Indeed, all of these steps take more time but are crucial when building clubs at the highest level.

Shims/hosel diameters

Shafts come in four distinct sizes; .335″ and .350″ for woods and .355″ (taper) and .370″ (parallel) for irons. As for club heads, it’s not quite that simple.  Some companies use universal hosels to allow for both taper and parallel shafts to be used in irons and when it comes to woods there are a few OEMs that have slightly tapered hosel designed to be used in conjunction with a collared ferrule (if you don’t understand what a collared ferrule is, check out the video below).

By knowing when to use shims to get a shaft to fit into a hosel—or in the more rare case when to sand down a graphite shaft it fit into a tapered hosel —llows more shaft options to the golfer and in the end, can provide a better club option not available through a traditional channel.

Grip specs

Just like shafts, grips have manufacturing tolerances for weight. Generally, it is plus/minus 1.5-2g on either side of the target weight. This is still very good when you consider how much a standard size grip weighs but at the extreme levels a grip still has the potential to throw off a set’s final spec. Just like with parallel shafts, professional club builders will go through the process of weighing out grips and designate them to specific clubs in the set before final assembly.

Although I can’t speak for every OEM, I know for a fact that after receiving grips from a supplier, Titleist goes the extra step by sorting grips into 3 categories and handpicks those bunched grips to build sets. It may seem minor, but when building clubs to exacting specifications, every gram matters.

To discuss this and other club building topics make sure to check out the GolfWRX Club Building Forum