Build and post-gauge
Nothing is called finished until it has been back on the gauges. Loft, lie, length and swing weight are recorded again after assembly and printed alongside the target figures.
Order of Operations
Ninety Minutes, and Why They Run in That Order
The sequence below is not a courtesy. Each block is designed to keep a particular kind of error out of the answer, and running them out of order reliably produces a spec that feels right in the bay and disappoints in June. Here is the whole thing, including the parts that are unflattering.
01
Gauge
Fifteen minutes on what you already own
02
Warm
Recorded, then held out of every average
03
Test
One variable moved at a time, never two
04
Confirm
Chosen build, then the correction table
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Your bag goes on the gauges before anything is hit
Loft, lie, length, swing weight and grip core on every club we intend to discuss. This takes about fifteen minutes and it changes the shape of roughly a third of the sessions we run, because a third of the sets that walk in here are outside the spec written on the invoice.
If your six iron is a degree and a half flat, we are no longer having a shaft conversation. We are having a much cheaper conversation about a bending bar.
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Warm-up is logged and then quarantined
The first ten or twelve swings of a February morning in Eugene are not a representative sample of you. They are cold, they are stiff, and they usually strike low on the face. We record them anyway, because the shape of the warm-up curve tells us when you have arrived.
Those strikes never enter an average. They sit in the sheet under a separate heading so nobody can quietly borrow them later to make a number look better.
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A baseline block with the club you brought
Ten minutes with your own club, scored properly. Without a baseline, everything we report is a claim rather than a comparison. This is also the block that tells us how repeatable you are today, which sets how many strikes each later test needs.
A tight baseline means we can settle a shaft question in twelve swings. A scattered one means twenty, and it means we will be more cautious about the conclusion.
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Testing, with exactly one thing moved
Shaft profile, then shaft weight, then length, then head. One at a time, always, even though it is slower and even though clients occasionally find it tedious. Change the head and the shaft together and you will feel a difference you cannot attribute to anything.
Between candidates we mark the face. Strike pattern is the first filter and it disqualifies options that would otherwise look good on a summary screen.
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A confirmation block on the winner
Ten minutes with the build we have landed on, scored as its own block rather than merged into the testing data. If the confirmation block does not resemble the block that won, we have found a preference rather than a result, and we say so.
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Paperwork, including the parts you can argue with
The build slip carries the spec. The session sheet carries the shot count, the discard count and the conditions. The offset card carries the bay-to-turf correction for your speed band. All three go home with you whether or not you order anything.
Session Sheet, Sample
Six iron
| Warm-up strikes, quarantined | 14 |
|---|---|
| Baseline strikes scored | 11 |
| Candidate builds tested | 4 |
| Strikes scored in testing | 62 |
| Strikes discarded, off-face | 9 |
| Confirmation strikes | 12 |
Discards are declared before testing begins: anything struck outside the taped zone, anything
where the instruments disagree past the tolerance, anything the golfer calls a miss.
Why the discard rule is written down first
If the rule for throwing out a shot is decided after the shot, it stops being a rule. Ours is fixed at the start of the block and applied without discussion, including on the swings that would have flattered a build we liked.
What to bring on the day
- The clubs you actually play, not the garage set
- A sleeve of your usual ball if you have a strong preference
- Golf shoes; the bay floor is turf, not carpet
- Any spec sheet from a previous fitting, anywhere
- A rough idea of how many rounds you play October to March
After the Bay
What Happens Once You Leave
A session that ends at the door is only half of the job. The rest of it runs on a slower clock.
A short re-check, free
Twenty minutes in the bay two to six weeks after you take delivery. Enough rounds to have formed an opinion, close enough that we still remember the session.
An audit seat if you want one
Between April and September you can convert the studio offset into a personal one by joining a Sunday turf block with the clubs we built.