A Short List, and We Would Rather Defend It Than Lengthen It
There is no display wall in this room, so this page is not a catalogue. It is a list of the component houses we have put enough clubs through to speak about honestly, plus a note on what each one earns its place doing.
The reasoning
Depth beats breadth when nobody is paying us to carry inventory
A fitter who claims familiarity with sixty shaft families is describing a spreadsheet, not experience. Knowing a shaft means having installed it repeatedly, watched what it does to a swing weight when it goes to length, seen how the tip section responds to a half-inch of trim, and had at least one golfer come back six months later to say what it felt like in cold weather.
We hold that depth on roughly a dozen families. When a session points at something outside the list, we say so plainly and either order it and learn on your build, or tell you the nearest thing we do know and let you choose. What we will not do is nod along as though every profile on the market lives in our heads.
The catalogue is not the skill. The repetitions are.
None of these relationships involve exclusivity, rebates, or volume targets. We buy through ordinary component distribution at ordinary component prices, and the flat build charge on your invoice is the same whichever line on this page your set ends up using.
Shaft houses
| House | Where it lands | Bench note |
|---|---|---|
| True Temper | Irons, wedges | The reference point. Half the sets that come through here are already on it, which makes it the easiest honest comparison we can run. |
| KBS | Irons, wedges | Where we go when a golfer is loading the mid-section hard and wants the head to arrive without the hit feeling harsh. |
| Nippon | Irons | Lighter steel options for players who have been told graphite is their only route out of a heavy set. Often it is not. |
| Project X | Irons, drivers | Firmer through the middle. Suits deliveries that are already stable and do not want help. |
| Fujikura | Driver, fairway | Broad enough profile range that we can move launch without changing weight class, which keeps one variable at a time honest. |
| Mitsubishi | Driver, fairway, hybrid | Our usual first stop when spin needs to come down and the golfer cannot afford to lose height. |
| Graphite Design | Driver, fairway | Ordered rather than assumed. Excellent, and we will say out loud when the tested gain does not justify the price. |
| UST Mamiya | Driver, hybrid | Strong at the lighter weights without going soft in the tip, which matters for slower deliveries. |
| Aerotech | Irons | Composite iron shafts for golfers with wrist or elbow history who still want a steel-like weight feel. |
Everything above is available in the weights and flexes the house publishes, and everything gets frequency-checked here before assembly rather than trusted from a label. Two shafts from the same run can measure a handful of cycles apart, and on a set build that is the difference between a matched progression and an odd club nobody can explain.
Grips
Golf Pride
The default, because the compounds are consistent between production runs and we can predict how they age in Valley summers. Cord variants go on most of the low-handicap sets in our files.
Lamkin
Where we send hands that want more damping. Also the easiest range to build up in half sizes without stacking tape past the point where the taper stops behaving.
Winn
Soft polymer for arthritic hands and for golfers who hold on far tighter than they think. It wears out faster. We say so, and we log a shorter grip review window.
Iomic and SuperStroke
Iomic for the tacky end of the range, SuperStroke almost entirely on putters where a larger profile is being used to quiet a wristy stroke rather than for comfort.
Grip choice is the one component decision where we will happily let feel win over data. There is no measurable performance argument that survives a golfer telling us a grip feels wrong in their hands. Size, on the other hand, is not a feel decision, and your file records the tape wrap count per hand so a future regrip cannot silently change it.
Heads
Ordered per build, from whoever makes the right one
We are not an authorised anything. Heads come through component distribution, which covers most of the major manufacturers plus a handful of smaller forging houses that will do a grind to order. The practical effect is that the head conversation starts from what your sheet says and not from what is hanging behind the counter.
For irons we most often end up with a cast cavity from one of the large makers, a forged option from a smaller house, or a mixed set that runs cast in the long irons and forged from the seven down. Mixed sets are more work to match and we charge the same for them, because the extra time is ours to absorb if we recommended it.
Two things we tell people about head brands
- The model year matters less than the fit. A two-season-old head bent to your lie and built to your length will beat this spring's release at stock spec more often than the marketing calendar would like you to believe.
- Adjustable hosels are a service item. If your driver has a sleeve, it needs a torque check on a wrench that has itself been checked. We do that free while you wait, on any club, whether or not it came from us.
What we will not put on this list
Anything sold on a story we cannot measure. If a component is marketed on a mechanism that does not show up on a frequency meter, a scale, a lie board or a monitor, we have no way to tell you whether it worked, and neither does anybody else. That is not a moral position, it is a limitation of our bench, and we would rather state it than sell around it.
We also do not carry counterfeit-risk supply. Component channels have a grey market and it is real. Everything here arrives through distribution with paperwork, which is dull and occasionally slower and is the reason a head we build into your set can be warranty-traced later.
Adding to the list
-
Something shows up repeatedly in sessions
Usually because a golfer arrives with it already in the bag and it tests well against the control. That is a signal, not a decision.
-
We buy a few and build with them
On our own time, into our own test heads, at three or four weights. This is the expensive part and it is the part that most benches skip.
-
It goes into real builds with a note in the file
Flagged as new to us, so that when the golfer comes back for a recheck we are specifically asking how it has held up.
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It earns a row or it quietly does not
Two families have come off this list since we started. Neither was bad. Neither was doing anything the others were not already doing better.
The component decision comes last, not first
Book the baseline. The list above only becomes relevant once there are numbers on a sheet telling us which direction to look in.