Iron Fitting
An iron set is a ladder. Its job is to produce evenly spaced, repeatable rungs, and any decision that improves one club while collapsing the spacing around it has made the set worse. We fit the ladder, then check that every rung still holds once the bay figures are corrected for what happens outdoors.
| Five iron | 178 yd |
|---|---|
| Six iron | 166 yd |
| Seven iron | 155 yd |
| Eight iron | 143 yd |
| Nine iron | 131 yd |
| Pitching wedge | 119 yd |
Lie Angle Is Almost Always the First Thing We Find
Of the iron sets that arrive here for a session, a clear majority are outside their stated lie by enough to matter, and a good number are inconsistent within themselves. Correcting that costs a fraction of a new set and is frequently the whole answer.
Sole Marks Before Static Numbers
A lie board tells you what the club did, which is the only thing worth knowing. We take dynamic sole marks across a full block rather than a couple of swings, because one heavy strike will happily show you a toe mark that never repeats.
Where the dynamic answer and the static measurement disagree, the dynamic answer wins. Static lie matters only as the starting point for the bending bar.
What we record per club
- Static loft and lie from the gauge
- Dynamic sole mark across at least eight strikes
- Face strike centre and spread, from tape
- Length to the ground line, and grip core size
- Swing weight, and whether it drifts across the set
Shaft Weight Moves More Than Flex Letter
Two shafts stamped with the same letter can sit thirty grams apart, and that thirty grams will change your low point, your tempo and your strike height more than the stiffness rating ever does. We test weight as its own axis and we test it before profile, because it reorders every later result.
Heavier is not automatically steadier. Plenty of golfers in the Valley have been sold a hundred-and-thirty-gram steel shaft that quietly costs them a club and a half of height in February air.
Where sets commonly go wrong
- Two clubs in the middle that carry within four yards
- A long iron nobody has hit well since it was bought
- Grips of three different core sizes across one set
- Swing weight drifting three points from five iron to pitching wedge
- A pitching wedge lofted so strong it orphans the gap wedge
Cold Turf Changes What a Ladder Should Look Like
From late October to March the fairways here hold rather than run, and carry becomes almost the entire distance number. A ladder built on August rollout produces a set that plays one club short for two thirds of the calendar in this valley.
So we ask, early, how many rounds you play in the wet half of the year. If the honest answer is most of them, the set is fitted to carry medians with less generous spacing at the top, because a long iron that is only useful in dry conditions is dead weight from November onward.
The pooled correction for irons is small
Mid irons translate from bay to grass better than any other full-swing category. The measured gap on a six iron sits around two yards, which is why we can be relatively assertive about iron gapping from indoor data and much more cautious about driver carry.
| Club | Bay reads | Confidence |
|---|---|---|
| Four iron | +2.8 yd | Moderate |
| Five iron | +2.3 yd | Good |
| Six iron | +1.9 yd | Good |
| Seven iron | +1.4 yd | Good |
| Eight iron | +0.9 yd | Good |
| Nine iron | +0.2 yd | Good |
| Pitching wedge | −0.4 yd | Moderate |
Confidence reflects how many paired blocks sit behind the figure, not how much we like it. Four iron carries fewer pairs because fewer clients still carry one.