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AXE Tour X Graphite shaft study

Nippon Shafts
Popeye

Popeye

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So tonight I'm starting my analysis of 3 different graphite shaft weights. 85g 95g and 105g. My own shift to graphite this year and the realization of the fairly shocking performance I wanted to experiment with the different shaft weights. The OEM offerings are getting lighter and lighter all the time. I have 3-8 iron heads and 3-5 iron heads. They will be mounted onto 2-85g, 2-95g and so on. All shafts will be S flex standard graphite length. I will have them on a monitor tested by at least 5 golfers of varying HP. From a teaching Pro to about a 15.
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The heads are from Golfworks. They the Maltby Ke4 tour + heads. They have a weight port to dial in swing weight but I'm not going to play with the the weights for now.
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The shafts are the AXE Tour X shafts. They are a hybrid shaft of sorts with a metal weave over graphite. Great feel and performance has been shockingly good.
It will be interesting to see distance differences, height differences, dispersion and personal likes.
I should have all date collected and posted by next Wednesday. I'll have some data to post by Saturday night. Should be interesting.

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So the clubs are built and ready to go. They were all spine aligned and I made sure they were all exact in length and on the tip trimming. I do have to say how good looking these heads are. It's a maltby design that has been tweaked for maybe 5 renditions.
 
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I look forward to the findings you get. What are you hoping comes of it? Are you hoping 1 weight does better than the other? I'm sure your going into this with an open mind.

I have a question. If one of the weights of the shafts gave you better distance versus a hair worse dispersion, which way would lean?
 
I bought the 105 and tested it out for a little bit last year. It is a great shaft for those who need max vibration dampening for injuries. Some might find it a little to good at reducing vibration and find it harder to judge mishits. But it does offer a little higher launch and very tight dispersion. Overall a good shaft for the money.
 
Bullfrog said:
I look forward to the findings you get. What are you hoping comes of it? Are you hoping 1 weight does better than the other? I'm sure your going into this with an open mind.

I have a question. If one of the weights of the shafts gave you better distance versus a hair worse dispersion, which way would lean?
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I design and build one off car parts for fun, so the engineer in me is super curious as to what I find. I currently have 3 different weights in play on my irons. 105 in the wedges 95 in the mid irons of sorts and just threw in some 85 for the 5 iron and a hybrid. Jury is still out on the 85 as I only hit them a few times.

I have a wide open mind for the data and I really hope it shows difinitive results. As for distance over dispertion,,,I'll take dispertion every day!!!
 
OK I will be following along with this thread! Really curious to see how much of a difference 10g in the same style shaft will make.
 
This should prove to be a fun and interesting shaft study. I'm looking forward to following along. I spent some time picking the brain of a club builder yesterday whom I'm having re-shaft a set of irons for me. There's a lot more to it than just removing and reinserting a shaft in a club.
 
So the first session will start at 3. All shafts were spine aligned and carefully trimmed to length. They all received a Pure grip. Swinging the three weights back to back gives a huge difference in feel. I hope to have the data from myself and the Pro tonight.

Clubs are gorgeous by the way and as I threw the grips on them a comment was made that the shafts are almost too pretty to cover with a grip.
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Ok so the results were fairly surprising to my self and the Pro.
My first session was with the 8 irons. I started with the 105g and hit 5 balls and threw out obvious bad swings.
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feel was ok.
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The 95g by far felt the best.
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85g left me with mixed feeling, felt light as expected.
The ball speeds and the distance was best with the 85, though it didn't feel the best the performance was surprisingly good. My dispersion wasn't the best but I'm in mid winter form.

Next I hit the 5 irons starting with the 85 first
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I really struggled with this setup and hit them again after the other two. This is the rehit.
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Next is the 95
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This iron I loved. Felt great and seemed easy to swing.
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The 105 felt ok but not any where as good as the 95. My best performance was with the 95. Even with the rehit on the 85 it just never felt right to me.

Onto the Pro. He was sure that the heavier weight club is what would perform best for him.
So he wanted to hit the 85 first.
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though he complained he couldn't feel the club it performed very well
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He really liked the feel of the 95 alot and felt it performed better than the 85.
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He absolutely hated the 105 and though the performance wasn't horrible he just hated it.

Surprisingly the 85s performance was best for him. It was the longest and the straightest.
I ran out of time to test the 8 iron with him but the first session showed that the lighter the shaft the higher the ball speed, swing speed and distance. I am thinking about possibly playing with the club head weights but that may only effect feel from player to player.
So from a feel perspective for both of us the 95 worked. The data shows the 85 had the best performance,,,,aside from me hating the 5 iron in 85. It also shiwed a consistant drop In distance as they got heavier. I want to repeat my session in a few days. As well as test another 3-4 golfers.

One thing may prove evident. The Pros data will show trends. I think data from everyone else would have to be studied over multiple sessions.
 
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Thanks very interesting.
How did they swingweight i.e. relative to steel?
Any comparisons to other common/better graphite options like steelfiber or recoil (oem or proto?)?
Fwiw I went from steel to 95g graphite and had to counterweight to get total weight up in order to hit them almost as well as my mid weight steel. I have a strong but fast/short swing so I am weight sensitive.
What was your sense of tip flex? Did you sense a kick or did they play firm? Do you think they play true to flex? How did this dispersion compare to your steel dispersion?
 
I have to grab my swing weight scale from my other house so I don't have swing weight data yet. I wanted to avoid counterbalancing for now and just see what strictly the lighter shaft played in performance.

A batter player pressed for time hit his Cleveland 588cb 5 iron in an S300 and then grabbed the 85g 5 iron and launched it straight as an arrow to 211. He was hitting his low 200. May have been aloft differential but before he hit he swore he wouldn't have been able to hit the lightweight shaft. He then took my similarly loft DBM forged head with an 85 shaft and went almost just as far as the Tour + head. So again the preconceived notion that better players have that they need weight comes into question.
These shafts play very true to flex with only the 85 for me getting that kick feeling. The Pro, really liked the way the the 95 loaded going onto the ball. Yet it was still behind the 85 in performance. Looking at the numbers on my 5 iron run I see a shot or two that should have been dropped. I will go back and see if I can get some better data and also see if the 8 iron test is repeatable.
Dispersion on these irons are very good. My timing was a bit off so some of my shots drifted but that was all me. If you look at the Pros dispersion it was pretty darn good. Switching weighted irons so quickly does play with the swing somewhat so judging dispersion based on 5 swings is harsh. Now if an entire range session was done with just one weight then that would be a better judgement of dispersion. From my own experience theses shafts are consistent and easy to adapt to.

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Wow, great swing speed in the sim data! This is an interesting test.

Dave
 
dthrog00 said:
Wow, great swing speed in the sim data! This is an interesting test.

Dave
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There is also a definite trend in ball speed increase as well. The lighter shafts are faster and the ball speed is up. Two of the golfers who have been playing at high levels for a long time were completely under the impression that the heavier weight would impart more energy on the ball. They almost didn't want to believe the performance of the lighter shaft.
Kinda falls back to an old boxing saying, speed equals power, without the speed there is no power.

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I've always been under the impression that lighter shafts create more speed, heavier shafts promote better control. It seems like that's the case with the pics you posted, but if you get too heavy, it starts having an adverse effect as well.
 
dtak84 said:
I've always been under the impression that lighter shafts create more speed, heavier shafts promote better control. It seems like that's the case with the pics you posted, but if you get too heavy, it starts having an adverse effect as well.
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I think there is a huge component to how the club feels as well. It will be interesting to see where higher HP players fall with dispersion. I think I will also have them hit their gamer 8 and 5 iron for comparison.

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Definitely! Different players will feel more comfortable with different weights. Loving this testing though, and wish I could do something like it on my own. Just need to find a launch monitor... lol
 
When I'm done with testing I'll make the clubs available to anyone who wants to experiment with them. You just have to post your results and then either send them back or send them to someone else. When I switched to the graphite shafts this year I came from S400s, I went with the 105 in my Cleveland wedges and they transformed them into lasar guided darts. Never hit a better wedge setup. The 95g went into everything else and the transition was very quick. Slight tempo change had them right where I wanted. But then the thought hit me on what weights will do what, led me to this.

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So I hit a different simulator today as my local one was closed. This one gave very limited data but it was easy to capture dispertion shots. So unable to get rid of bad shots I was getting very frustrated as 1 out of 4 shots went way way right. I couldn't take it any longer and switched sims.
Huge difference but I lost 45 min.
Here is my gamer, DBM forged head 95g AXE shaft 8 iron
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one short one blew up the average but it's a degree weaker than the Tour + so you see these shafts are very repeatable on dispersion. Here is the Tour + with the same 95 shaft
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Next is my gamer 5 iron that I have an 85g shaft in DBM head
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For a 5 iron I'm pretty happy with that spread.
The Tour + is a hotter head an quite a bit longer
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So to the questions on dispersion on these shafts it's pretty good.

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Great data. Why do you think the 105s felt great in your wedges but not the rest of the set?
 
rmgatl said:
Great data. Why do you think the 105s felt great in your wedges but not the rest of the set?
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When I built a demo 6 iron with the 105 shaft I wasn't overly happy with the feel, it went head to head with the Z745 and the Srixon won out. I bought them. Later on in the season I picked up the DBM head again but tried the 95 g shaft,,, this time and it worked very well for me so I built a whole set. Since the wedges are cut down so much and with the longer hosels my thinking was if I used the 105 shaft they would final weight close to the 95 shafts. The 105 shafts in the wedges were like magic. Now I'm not saying they won't work in the longer irons, it's a feel thing. The difference in weights, what worked and what felt best or better had me questioning the whole shaft weight scenario. Then it led to start thinking about what type of golfer would prefer what weight. Also where would the shafts fall as far as performance.

The more time I spend with the three different weights the more I get accustomed to what each club likes for a swing from me. Which also leads to a better feel when swinging. The 105 will tend to fade while the same swing with the 85 will tend to draw. But that's just me, repeat sessions this week for myself should be interesting to see if the initial results are repeatable with more familiarity of the clubs.

I should also have a few more test subjects as the week goes on.
 
Popeye said:
When I built a demo 6 iron with the 105 shaft I wasn't overly happy with the feel, it went head to head with the Z745 and the Srixon won out. I bought them. Later on in the season I picked up the DBM head again but tried the 95 g shaft,,, this time and it worked very well for me so I built a whole set. Since the wedges are cut down so much and with the longer hosels my thinking was if I used the 105 shaft they would final weight close to the 95 shafts. The 105 shafts in the wedges were like magic. Now I'm not saying they won't work in the longer irons, it's a feel thing. The difference in weights, what worked and what felt best or better had me questioning the whole shaft weight scenario. Then it led to start thinking about what type of golfer would prefer what weight. Also where would the shafts fall as far as performance.

The more time I spend with the three different weights the more I get accustomed to what each club likes for a swing from me. Which also leads to a better feel when swinging. The 105 will tend to fade while the same swing with the 85 will tend to draw. But that's just me, repeat sessions this week for myself should be interesting to see if the initial results are repeatable with more familiarity of the clubs.

I should also have a few more test subjects as the week goes on.
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I wonder if the 105s play stiffer (especially in the tips) and/or a lot lower torque? I can't find any specifications or data on the 105 shafts at all and I've emailed Robin (no response). I assume swingweights came out the same with the 95 and 105?

One test would be to SS x2 the 105 (put your 6 iron shaft in an 8 iron) and see how it feels.

I'm interested because my clubhead speed went up about 5-6 mph after adding weight to my 95g graphite shafts to get them closer to mid-weight steel. My clubhead speed is similar to yours but I make a fast 1/2 to 3/4 swing (6'4", 250 lbs).

I hope someone can test and profile these shafts i.e. the golfshaftreviews site - if Robin will send them shafts.
 
rmgatl said:
I wonder if the 105s play stiffer (especially in the tips) and/or a lot lower torque? I can't find any specifications or data on the 105 shafts at all and I've emailed Robin (no response). I assume swingweights came out the same with the 95 and 105?

One test would be to SS x2 the 105 (put your 6 iron shaft in an 8 iron) and see how it feels.

I'm interested because my clubhead speed went up about 5-6 mph after adding weight to my 95g graphite shafts to get them closer to mid-weight steel. My clubhead speed is similar to yours but I make a fast 1/2 to 3/4 swing (6'4", 250 lbs).

I hope someone can test and profile these shafts i.e. the golfshaftreviews site - if Robin will send them shafts.
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From what I can tell the 105 and the 95 play very close to the same flex. Here is some torque data and tip stiffness. Maltby has the 95 and the 105 charted as the same characteristics on thier shaft ratings.
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Next time I talk to Robin I'll try and get some answers if that data doesn't help.

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I had the Pro hit the 8 irons today and the tend held through in a way but for some reason he really loved the 95 and hit the crap out of it.
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that was the 85
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and that was the 105, they just don't quite go as far and it shows in ball speed and club head speed...
But then. The trend buster, the 95 club
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not sure why but he was killing this club. He loved the way it loaded up. Hope to have the data from some random golfers in the next few days.
 
i pulled the kbs tour, 370 parallel, 130g ot of my cb3 7 iron yesterday. i have been playing for a couple years and those are really the only shaft I "know". i have been fitted before, with the mizzie shaft opti and at a srixon fitting. all three time suggested kbs tour stiff as the first choice. my sole purpose was simply to test the axe 95g stiff to get a feel for the 95g shaft. i have never played with irons that have been shafted with graphite except an occasional hit of my buddies mizuno ez forged irons with regular flex graphite shaft. they do not play well for me. i did the install myself. i hit the iron today out on the fairway, 25-30 mph wind, 31°f, as a blizzard is approaching. this shaft has a very good feel to it. i can feel it load and release nicely. it is no way near whippy. it is comfortable. the feedback i get is very good. in no way does it feel dead. i can feel where the contact if on the face all the time. a pure flush feel great. thin or toes send a bit of vibration to my hands. not in a bad way. like cold steel, but in a good way. i can not comment, with surety, on the flight path because of the wind. I did not try to control the flight because my time was limited. i just hit normally. there is no loss in distance, for sure. i can not say longer because of the winds play on the flight. same thing with height all be it the ball is flying high, higher than the kbs tour. once again wind affected im sure. but they do feel good. now, if the forecast is correct, i will not be playing again soon...
 
Awesome, I'm glad that you are enjoying them. Robin who is swapped with new products right now is supposed to get on the THP but there is alot of new products to test in the very near future. I even believe his new website has a place to become or join on as a tester. I am also trying to get him hooked up with JB to do some give aways with needed feedback.
With the 95 g shafts there has only been great feed back from any testers.

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I had another tester but wasn't present and all of the data on the screen was lost due to a phone problem with pics.
The tester is about a 6 HP with a very slow take away but with a very fast transition. Driver swing speed is 105 ish.
He started out with the 8 iron in the 85 g. He was very consistent at 155 yards and 92 MPH swing speed but hated the club feel.
He raved about the 95 g shaft and hit that to 162 y and a swing speed bump of 95. The 105 was a down ward trend to 150 y and a swing speed of 87. He complained of a lack of feel with the 105 as well till he got to the ball and through.

His dislike for the 85 continued with the 5 irons. He couldn't tell where the club was. I guess his really strong move doesn't work for the lightest shaft he only got 190-195 yards.

With the 95,,,,it was a missile. The first one went 225 y. He settled in with 205-210 y and just couldn't say enough about how it felt. With the 105 there was a drop off in performance 195-200 y. Wasn't crazy about the feel but it worked well. Swing speed dropped off between the 95 to the 105 but he was so miserable with the 85 it was the lowest of them all. They had written down the swing speeds but that paper somehow vanished.

So with the variable of a different swing and transitions,,, there are trends shoqing going lighter with and an increase in speed and distance. But when feel comes into play it dominates how the club plays. I want to come back to this guy when I play with the club head weights and see if I can find a happier place for him with the 85s.


Next I need to find a high HPer with a slow swing speed and see what's up. I'm heading back out to sea so I'll have to leave it to someone else to get the data and hopefully grab screen shots again.

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