Custom Golf Club Fitting - Shaft Alignment - Spine Finding

Golf shaft alignment is a topic I have spent a great deal of time on since the production of this video in 2011. Shaft spines on premium shafts are no longer common. Most premium shaft companies cull low quality, "spined" shafts. Not all, so it is still important to check for out of round golf shafts. The solution is to return the shaft for a quality shaft. The myth that there is benefit to spine alignment persists because some club making companies profit from selling the service.

I have preserved this video because it is an excellent review of shaft measuring procedures.

On my shaft review site, https://www.golfshaftreviews.info I publish the redial consistency of the shafts I measure. Radial consistency is the difference in frequency between the hard side of the shaft and the soft side. The lower the difference, the rounder the shaft. Round shafts are what we want to be playing, shafts that do not exhibit any "spine". A shaft company director of R&D once put it simply, less than 2 CPM difference, tour grade, less than 5 CPM difference, consumer grade, more than 5 CPM difference, dumpster grade.

Think about your golf swing, when the shaft is horizontal to the ground, the toe is up and the load is heal to toe. At impact the toe is out, the shaft has rotated 90 degrees, the load is front to rear. In the Royal Precision scale, 4.3 CPM is the difference between half flex increments. For example, a 5.5 shaft is 4.3 CPM stiffer than a 5.0 shaft. So ask yourself a simple question, do you want to be playing a shaft that changes stiffness from a 5.0 half way down your swing to a 5.5 at impact. I don't. That means that a shaft with a spine should not have been shipped. It should have been discarded. It did not pass a quality standard. No process of spine alignment can fix this shaft, it is junk.

Shafts that are round, 2 CPM or less between hard plane and soft plane do not benefit from any sort of spine alignment. The only benefit from shaft alignment of a round shaft is the profit made by the club maker selling the service.