A Repair Desk That Grew a Fitting Bay, Not the Other Way Round
Bunker Lab Golf opened in 2011 as a one-room repair shop taking regrips and loose heads off the back of a Carmichael driving range. The fitting bays came later, and they came because the repair work kept showing us the same problem.
The pattern that started this
Running a repair desk gives you a strange view of the local golf population. You do not see swings, you see equipment after it has lived a life. Over the first four years we gauged several thousand irons that came across the counter for something unrelated — a regrip, a loose ferrule, a cracked hosel — and we started writing down what we found while the club was already clamped.
The finding was dull and consistent. A large share of the sets belonging to people who had been professionally fitted were no longer at the specs they had been fitted to. Not by a lot. By enough. Two degrees here, a quarter inch there, a swing weight that had drifted three points after somebody swapped to a lighter grip without adding tape. None of it was anybody's fault. Equipment simply moves, and the fitting industry had no habit of going back to check.
A fitting is a photograph. Everyone treats it like a birth certificate.
So we changed the product. Instead of selling a fitting, we started selling a file: a set of measurements with a date attached, a build made to those measurements, and a scheduled point at which somebody looks again. The fitting bays exist to serve the file. The repair desk is still the busiest part of the room.
The room itself
Two bays, one bench, no showroom
The studio occupies about eleven hundred square feet on 2140 Fair Oaks Boulevard, Suite 4. The front half is hitting space: two bays into a net, a launch monitor on a rail so it can serve either bay, a lie board, and enough room behind the ball to swing a driver without thinking about it. The back half is the build bench — vise, chop saw, frequency analyser, loft and lie machine, scale, and a curing cabinet that holds a steady temperature so epoxy sets the same way in January as it does in July.
There is no retail wall. Heads and shafts arrive per order from the component partners we work with. That decision costs us impulse business and it is the reason we can look at a golfer's existing set and honestly say it does not need replacing.
What we deliberately kept small
- One golfer at a time. Both bays exist so a build can be tested while a fitting runs, not so two clients can be worked in parallel.
- A short brand list. We would rather know six shaft families thoroughly than keep a catalogue we cannot speak to. The list lives on the component partners page.
- No membership tiers. Rechecks are priced per visit. There is no annual plan to forget you are paying for.
How we work with coaches
Equipment is downstream of instruction
We do not teach. There is no lesson tee here and we do not offer swing advice during a fitting beyond asking you to make your normal pass. When a golfer arrives mid-change, we say so and we postpone the build.
Several teaching professionals around the Sacramento area send us baseline work and we send their numbers back to them in writing. If your coach wants the sheet, tell us at the desk and we will forward it the same week. We do not pay referral fees in either direction, which keeps the recommendation honest.
Three things we say out loud on every first visit
One. The answer may be that your clubs are fine. Roughly a third of baseline sessions end with a bend, a regrip, and no purchase.
Two. We will show you the raw readings, including the ones that do not support a sale. If a shaft change produced a two-yard difference and nothing else, you will hear the number.
Three. The file is yours. If you move away or decide to work with another builder, ask and we will send the whole history over. It is your data.
Who you will actually meet
Four people run this room. Depending on the day you may deal with one of us or all four, and the person who measures your set is usually the person who builds it. Short biographies are on the team page, and the work each of us handles is broken out under what we do.