The tee club is a length problem before it is a head problem

Start with the driver you already own

Your current club goes on the gauges first and then gets hit until the pattern settles. Face tape tells us where you meet the ball, which is the single most informative thing in the whole session and costs nothing. A golfer striking consistently towards the heel has a completely different set of solutions available than one who is all over the face, and no amount of launch data separates those two cases.

Only once that baseline exists does anything change. Every configuration after this gets compared against your own club, on the same unit, on the same afternoon, in the same weather.

Then length, then where the mass sits

Standard retail driver length has crept out to around forty-five and a half inches, which exists to produce a distance number on a demo day rather than to fit anybody. Shortening a driver costs perhaps two miles an hour of club head speed and regularly returns far more than that in strike quality. It also raises frequency, so the shaft that felt right at forty-five and a half may not be the shaft you want at forty-four and a quarter.

Once length is settled we move mass around. Tip weight, butt weight, head mass: the same total weight can produce two different swing balance readings and two very different feels through transition. Golfers who describe a driver as feeling whippy are usually describing a balance problem, not a stiffness problem.

Profile before brand

The shaft library holds ninety-six wood profiles and every one is marked with a measured frequency at a reference length. We work by profile shape and measured stiffness, not by which house made it. On a fair number of sessions the winning profile turns out to be a discontinued model from three seasons ago that costs a third of the current flagship.

Head selection comes last and it is often the least consequential decision of the afternoon. Modern driver heads within a given category perform closer to each other than the marketing suggests. What separates them for you is usually centre of gravity position relative to your strike pattern, which is exactly what the face tape from stage one told us.

Loft, lie and the settings nobody adjusts

Adjustable hosels are genuinely useful and almost universally left in the neutral position for the life of the club. We set them deliberately, record the setting on the sheet, and explain what turning it would do so that you can undo the change if the season shifts.

Driver lie angle matters less than iron lie angle but it is not nothing, particularly for taller or shorter golfers who have adapted their setup around a club that never fit. It gets measured and recorded either way.

Wisconsin air, and the honest carry number

A driver tested indoors in February and the same driver hit into a lake breeze in April are two different experiences. Cold dense air costs carry, and a headwind off Lake Michigan costs more. We record ambient conditions on the session sheet and we do not quote you an indoor carry figure as though it were a course yardage. Ball speed, spin and strike location transfer. Carry does not.