NiftyNiblick

Does anybody know the shaft tip diameter for this club? Is it a standard .370?

I'm one of those headcases who hits a club better if I like how it looks. Those OnOff hybrids look seriously good to me. Does anybody know if the lie angles can be flattened to accomodate longer shafts so they'll play more like a small fairway wood?

The technology and design of these high end Japanese fairway woods look really great, but my word, those upright lie angles! I'd have to remove a couple of inches from each arm if I didn't want the toe of the club sticking up in the air at address. Does anybody else experience this, or is it just I?

I played a classic Ray Cook mallet for years before going through the inevitable flavor of the week phase. Right now, I seem to have settled on a Yes! Victoria II. It seems as good as anything else. I think it's a mallet but one could possibly call it a wide flange. Still, putting, chipping, and sand play have been my Achilles heel forever. That's why I love our 5290 yard par 66 course. I'm not missing every single green as I possible could on a 6800 yard brute, so I avoid candlepin bowling scores. Nobody's choosing me for the Ryder Cup team. It's about fresh air and socialiizing with my friends for me. But at 65, i still love it.

At the age of 63, I have been enjoying some of my best ball striking in recent years. With a USGA index of 8.3 and a home course handicap of 8, I'm presently enjoying a period of playing over my head. Now I'm taking a few lessons on the clock matrix wedge system as espoused most famously by Dave Pelz. This requires more turf wedges and entails giving up something on which I've been dependent for fifty seasons of golf, the dedicated sand iron. I have a collection of sand iron type wedges that are virtually turf useless, but with their very curved leading edges, are infinitely superior to the all purpose wedge in greenside bunkers. These include a Lovett Tour Standard, an NGC Condor, a Moe Norman Sandy, and even the infamous Alien wedge! If you don't use a dedicated sand iron like one of these, you perhaps don't realize how much less resistance that they meet in the sand as their curved leading edges part it as the hull of a boat parts water. A standard layed open turf-useable wedge feels like it's excavating a cavern in comparison, even though merely spashing a very shallow cushion of sand. Thus, in addition to screwing around with this clock matrix system, I've got to learn sand play all over again. It wouldn't normally be prudent to mess with one's own game when playing well, but I'm retired without a hell of a lot else to do. Also, i enjoy the challenge of learning a new short game system with the wedge set, but I'm getting help with that while making the sand adjustments on my own. So far, distance control on bunker shots seems much more difficult. I can get the ball to pop out, but I feel as though I'm swinging much harder and the ball is not sailing out as far. My custom turf wedges are 50-6, 55-8, 60-4°. Even layed open, none have a lot of bounce--I really don't like bounce from the turf--so I have to control depth of entry in the sand with my swing itself. If it becomes necessary to return to my sand iron, I will probably have to give up my dedicated driving iron and develop confidence in my 4-wwod on tight driving holes. Now, having gotten all that out of the way, I find the Miura wedges to perform very nicely on my club's turf. The biggest problem is not duplicating lengths with the longer swing of a weaker wedge and the shorter swing of a stronger one. Getting the matrix down is not as simple as it might seem. I think in the end, the clock matrix wedge distance system will not completely replace look and feel golf. It just gives you someplace to go when a look and feel stroke is just not coming to you under pressure.

The Fourteen J-Spec is really stable at impact. Frankly, the 52 might be as good a wedge as I've ever owned, this including Scratch and Kenneth-Smith customs. My disappointment is in the lack of low bounce options on the matching higher lofted wedges. I don't know why the Japanese love so much bounce because you can't can't play the high soft shot from forward in your stance with a bouncy wedge. They're OK for low, high spin shots from back in the stance, but not high, soft, shots.

Does that company make any non-offset putters? I prefer shaft-aligned or onset putters but a number of clubmakers are only making offset models. I didn't see anything not offset on their website.

The stock Mach Line shaft isn't bad. I switched to a matching Aldila NV Pro 105, and now I'm thinking that I may have hit the club a little longer with the Mach Line.

I think that that's a very nice looking driver. Too strong lofted and upright for me. Although visually, that certainly LOOKS weaker than 10.5°, so probably just too upright.

I LOVE the Titleist Vokey 400 head shape with its greater depth in the heel area than the tear-drop shaped 200 Series. (Truth be told, I liked the round 300 Series headshape better than the 200 as well.) Those two new Japanese Titleist wedges look absolutely great--except for the ten degrees of bounce. If they were a 52-6 and a 58-4 with one last shot at spin-milled grooves before the USGA's stupid new groove rules, I would have been unable to resist them. Instead, sadly, they are for my style of play a pair of dedicated sand irons without the preferred curved sand iron leading edge.

Because twenty-nine years after TaylorMade introduced the "Original One," the OEMs (incl JDMs) still won't let you have it your way. My assertion is simply this: if you can't ask for the exact loft/face/lie angle combination that you want, the manufacturers of drivers and fairway metalwoods are simply not doing their job.

Interesting topic, Gocchin. The pitching wedge that comes with my MC-102s has 47° loft and I've left it that way. My Fourteen MT-28 J.Spec II has 52° loft like a traditional old standard pitching wedge or a modern gap wedge. Here's where it gets tricky. The 52 is so stable at impact, it almost feels like my 1977 Spalding Executive which, as a thirty year old feeling my oats, I could jump all over without fear of mis-hitting. I would love to buy the matching Fourteen 58, even though I'd be hitting fewer full swing shots with it. But the Fourteen 58 has about 10° bounce--the Japanese seem to love their bounce in higher lofted wedges--which means I wouldn't be able to play my little drop-dead flip from way forward in my stance. I go with a Vokey 58-4 or a Scratch 58-PDG. (I also loved the ancient Cleveland 691 58-0, but mine's completely worn.) The Vokey is the better full swing club, but despite its minimal bounce, it has a wide sole which adds bounce if you lay it open. For that type of shot, the Scratch wedge is better. I would love a Fourteen 58-4 because that little cavity on the back creates an impact feel that I prefer--but they don't make one. For most of my golf life I've bagged a dedicated sand iron for bunker play only. I love the extremely curved leading edge that these clubs have which displaces less sand in the splash and thus finds less resistance. I am for now giving this up to experiment with draw and fade drivers. (I want to hit driver more than four or five times as I've been doing at my club .)

The Miura CB-301s are too tear-drop shaped (shallow in the heel area) for me to call them forgiving. I have forged cavity backs in this same shape from California Golf Technologies so it's not a completely uninformed opinion. One the other hand, my MC-102s are stable at impact over a more reasonable span of face area, and I would never hesitate to recommend them to somebody in my index range (11.3).

I play Japanese forged irons, but my hands don't feel the difference between castings and forgings or between carbon steel and stainless. There are some higher tech game improvement castings that I'd like to try, but the higher the technology, the fewer custom options are available. Castings come from inventory. Custom forgings are crafted when you order them, and therein, to me, lies the bigger difference. I wish I knew it at the time, but I could have had my Miuras stamped 2-9 instead of 3-PW, this so the loft/number correlations matched that with which I grew up. Try getting that from Callaway.

Honma needs some serious cosmetic advice imho.

Musical instruments, motorcycles, hi fi equipment, and golf clubs--is there anything that these guys don't do? Does look like an awfully nice golf club, I must admit.

Here's an oldie but goodie with which I can identify, putt4! There isn't an OEM on ANY continent making drivers or fairways with my preferred loft/face angle/lie angle combos. I wish you better luck with your search than I've had, but even 2+ years later, it wouldn't surprise me if you're still looking! But a "Scratch" type company making woods to custom spec would really hit the spot about now.

Yeah, swing plane has a lot to do with it. I takes half-dollar size divots with my middle and short irons, and none with everything else. (You're old enough to remember fifty-cent coins.) I also have a flattish, hickory-shaft era draw swing (or that's how it was described to me) which concludes with me leaning forward and facing the target on my follow through with my arms up in front of my face. (If you look at ancient, sepia colored photos of guys playing in knickers, neckties, and argyle socks, you'd know what they meant by that hickory shaft swing thing.) None of the straight up reverse C finish of the modern swing. I'd end up with a reverse weight shift trying to emulate that. It all comes because most of my six feet of height is trunk. I've got shortish legs and longish arms like an ape (albeit a quite handsome one). That pretty much takes upright fairway woods out of play for me.

If you're a 13 and are hitting 14° fairway woods, that's something. I'm an 11 at age sixty-three, but was an 8 or 9 most of my adult life and briefly a 7 at my very best. I NEVER hit anything anything under 16° from the highway. Most of my drivers have been 12 or 13°, even when I was younger. You must have a nice, upright swing, plenty of swingspeed, and not a lot of hit fairways from which you can smash those strong lofted fairway woods!

Is PRGR calling it a 4-wood now, Duff? Mine was labeled a 16.5° 3-wood. With that particular design, the lie angle is less important. It's got a real rocker sole that sets up nice for most anyone. I couldn't hit it well. Don't know why. I loved how it looked. I felt confident with it until I hit enough mediocre shots. The guy who bought it from me really stripes it and calls it the best fairway wood he's ever owned. In any case, I hate upright lie angles and didn't find that lie uncomfortable at all; even if it was upright, it didn't play excessively upright. I bet that you'll hit it much better than I did and enjoy it a lot.

My MC-102s vs. Titleist AP-2 ....#3 --#4 ---#5 --#6 #-7 --#8 --#9-- PW Lie.. 59.0 59.5 60.0 60.5 61.0 61.5 62.0 62.5 .......60.0 61.0 62.0 62.5 63.0 63.5 64.0 64.0

Most of you are younger than I and didn't play for decades with persimmon, laminated maple, and first generation metalwoods that still used wooden club lie angle to length correlations. Thus you cannot appreciate the extent to which I loathe upright fairway metalwoods. It is entirely possible that bendable hosels are less than ideal from the standpoint of certain dynamic considerations. I defer to your expertise in that regard. Not one of those compromises, however, would be as annoying to me as upright lie angles which I hate with a seething purple passion! If I'm fit correctly, I'll hit the ball better--period. This website's proshop is filled with absolutely gorgeous fairway woods with excellent workmanship, superb materials, cutting edge technology, and specs that would make me hook them like I was walking Times Square at 3 am. It's not my fault than an entire generation of golfers have learned to play with the toes of their woods pointing to the sky. It's just not my game. In the event that there's somebody out there who shares my issues in this regard, I just thought that I'd point out the Fourteens. They're something that you guys sell in the way of high end, high quality fairway woods which people with a flat swing like mine could actually hit. Anyway, my generation will soon be dead and the JDMs and American OEMs will be able to ignore us without complaints!

While checking out the Fourteen website, I notice that their fairway woods do not share the common JDM characteristic of being excessively upright. I was always curious why JDM fairwoods were so upright when most of the irons are, happily in my eyes, a degree or two flatter than American OEM standards. It doesn't matter so much in the irons, of course, because they are easily ordered with custom lies. With the fairwayas, it's not so easy. I hope that Fourteen is successful with their fairway wood line and that other JDMs will follow suit with flatter offerings. Of course, the entire issue could be resolved if adjustable hosels became the standard.

I quite agree in certain respects. There are several shots that I could play with my 58s and 60s if they had a medium bounce sole that I don't play now. But the shots that I do play with the LW don't call for any help from the trailing edge. I've got all kinds of wedges in my club museum of a basement-- a certain Cobra Phil Rodgers model (not the Trusty Rusty) comes to mind that gave me absolute fits--and now I know that my ideal setup goes something like 48-50/-6, 53-55/-6 to 8, and 58-60 /4 (or less), plus an old fashioned oval faced sand iron. In all fairness, I don't see that rig in many other bags, so mine is the game that it fits.

Realistically, I've only got two fairway shots up above my five iron. Estimating 180 for the five iron, that would be 195 for a hybrid or lofted fairway wood, and maybe 210-215 for the stronger fairway wood. If I go 4 and 7 woods, then my hybrid slot would be primarily used for a dedicated driving iron. I've got a 19° Epon for that circumstance. My beautiful Miura cavity backs have the wrong lofts, but if I were to get numbered irons from a custon grinder, I would go 4-wood, 20-23-26° hybrid set, all leading to a 30-35-40-45° #s 6-9 set. That would reduce my yardage increments to barely ten yards between the hybrids, giving me 4 shots after the 6-iron (as opposed to only two after the five-iron). How many clubs are that--driver, fairway wood, three hybrids, and four numbered irons for nine, right? That leaves room for 50, 55, and 60° turf wedges, a dedicated sand iron, and a putter. Perfect.