Home › Bench Method
Seven stages, in a stubborn order
Fittings go wrong in predictable places. Somebody hits before they are warm, a number gets read before the sample is big enough, or a decision gets made on feel and then quietly reversed on the next club. The sequence below exists to make those mistakes harder.
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Intake, before you touch a club
Fifteen minutes of conversation. Which courses you play, how often, what the last three rounds looked like, what hurts afterwards, and which shot you would trade two strokes to fix. We also ask what you have already been told by other fitters, because contradicting someone accidentally is a bad way to build trust.
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Static numbers
Height, wrist to floor, glove span, forearm length, and posture photographed at address. These are the least interesting measurements in the building and they take four minutes. Their only real job is to give us a starting length so the first trial club is not absurd.
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Your own clubs, measured cold
Before anything new appears, whatever you walked in with goes on the gauge. Length, lie, loft, swing weight, frequency, grip size and wear pattern. Half the useful conclusions of a session come out of this step, and it is the one most shops skip.
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Roll room or bay capture
Now you hit, or putt. We record a baseline with your existing club and nothing else changed. The camera runs, the surface reading from that morning is noted on the sheet, and the sample keeps going until the numbers stop wandering — usually somewhere between twelve and twenty strokes.
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One variable at a time
Trials change a single specification per round. Length, then lie, then head style, then shaft. Changing two at once produces a result you cannot attribute, and an unattributable result is a guess wearing a lab coat. It is slower. It is also the reason our recommendations survive contact with an actual golf course.
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The build
Assembly happens here, on our bench, not at a distant plant. Shafts are pulled or trimmed to the recorded length, weight is set to the agreed swing weight, grips go on with counted tape wraps, and every finished club is regauged before it goes in the bag. Typical turnaround is five to nine days depending on component lead time.
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The check-back
Three or four rounds after pickup, come in for a free twenty-minute pass. We remeasure, compare against the card, and adjust lie or weight if the on-course reality disagrees with the bay. Most bags need one small change. Some need none. Occasionally something we were confident about turns out to be wrong, and we would rather learn that from you than from silence.
What the numbers on your card mean
Every session produces a spec card. It is deliberately plain: a table, a date, two signatures and a short note column. Below is a walk-through of the fields people ask about most.
| Field | What it records |
|---|---|
| Playing length | Sole to butt cap with the club soled at your address position, not a catalogue length. |
| Static lie | Gauge reading with the head soled flat. The reference point for future bends. |
| Delivered lie | What the lie board and face tape said at impact. The number that actually matters. |
| Loft | Measured, not stamped. Stamped and measured differ more often than you would like. |
| Swing weight | Scale reading after grip and any tip or butt weight is installed. |
| Frequency | Butt-clamped reading in cycles per minute, taken on the finished club. |
| Grip and wraps | Model, core size and the exact number of tape layers under it. |
| Note column | Why a decision was made when the data was close. Written in plain sentences. |
Four habits that keep a session honest
The sample has to settle
Three good strikes prove nothing. We keep collecting until the spread stops shrinking, and if a player is having an unrepresentative day we say so and reschedule rather than fit a stranger's swing.
Baseline before comparison
Any new club is judged against your current one under the same conditions, on the same morning. A number with no baseline is a number with no meaning.
Feel gets a vote, not a veto
When two options are statistically indistinguishable, the one that feels better wins, every time. When one option is clearly better and feels strange, we explain the trade and let you sit with it.
Everything is written down
Including the options we rejected and why. If you return in two years wanting to revisit a decision, the reasoning is still on file rather than in somebody's memory.