Tape and a lie board first. The radar can wait.

Lie, and why it is the biggest lever

Lie angle is the specification with the largest effect per degree and the smallest amount of public attention. A seven iron two degrees upright at impact starts the ball meaningfully left of target, and the player's response is almost never "my lie is wrong". It is a grip change, or an aim adjustment, or a slower transition — a compensation built to survive a spec error.

We read lie with a board and a strip of sole tape at your real swing speed. Static lie gets recorded too, but only as the reference for the bend. If the two numbers disagree by more than a degree and a half, we say so out loud, because that disagreement is usually the story of the session.

Length from delivery, not from height

The wrist-to-floor chart is a decent way to pick the first trial club and a poor way to finish a fitting. Two players with the same forearm length can want an inch of difference depending on posture, arm hang and how much they extend through the ball.

Face tape settles it. Long clubs produce toe strikes on a player who is reaching; short clubs produce heel contact and a hosel-shy feeling. We chase the centre of the pattern rather than the centre of a chart, and the answer is standard length surprisingly often.

Head style, honestly assessed

Blades are lovely and most players should not carry a full set of them. That said, the old rule that only single-digit handicaps earn a compact head has not survived the last decade of construction. Modern players' cavities give up very little in workability while keeping a meaningful chunk of the forgiveness a mid handicap needs on a mishit.

What we look at is dispersion on off-centre strikes and how much your carry distance falls with them. If the drop from a centre strike to a half-inch toe strike is under eight yards, the compact head is defensible. Past twelve, you are paying for looks in a currency of missed greens.

Shafts, in the order that matters

Weight first, then bend profile, then flex label. The label on the shaft is the least informative of the three — a stiff from one maker can measure softer than another's regular, and the frequency meter on our bench does not care what is printed on the sticker.

Weight is where most improvement lives. Players who have been fighting a heavy steel shaft for a decade often pick up both control and a little speed by dropping twenty grams, and the reverse is equally true for a strong player whose light shafts arrive early and shut.

Set makeup at both ends

Two questions get asked before you leave. At the top: where does your long iron stop producing enough height to hold a green, and what should replace it? At the bottom: how big is the gap between the last iron and your first wedge, and is the pitching wedge loft even in the same family as the rest of the set?

Strong lofts have quietly pulled modern pitching wedges to angles that used to be a nine iron. The result is a set that ends abruptly and a scoring gap nobody planned. We map the whole carry ladder and adjust from both directions.