A fitting is a sequence of measurements followed by a sequence of decisions. Here is the whole sequence, in order, including the parts that are unglamorous.
This takes fifteen minutes and is the part most studios skip. Every club you brought gets measured for loft, lie, length, swing weight and frequency, and the results go on a sheet before anybody mentions new equipment.
The reason is simple. If your 7-iron is a degree and a half flat and an eighth of an inch long, then the ball flight you have been trying to describe is partly an equipment artefact. Fitting you to new clubs without knowing that is fitting you to a moving target.
Roughly one visit in six ends here. The measurements reveal something correctable, we bend or adjust it, you go and play with it for two weeks, and either the problem is gone or you come back and we continue.
You warm up with your own club until the numbers settle, which usually takes a dozen shots. That settled group becomes the control. Everything after it is compared against it.
Shaft first, or head first, or length first — the order depends on what the baseline suggested. But only one moves at a time. If we swap shaft and head together and the number improves, we have learned that something helped, which is not useful information.
We judge on the middle of a group of eight, discarding the obvious mis-hits and, importantly, the one flushed shot that everybody wants to build a set around. Your best swing is not your typical swing and the set has to serve the typical one.
Impact location is the variable that quietly wrecks fitting data. Two shots with identical club speed and different strike points produce different spin and different carry, and no amount of shaft testing fixes a heel pattern.
If a combination measures marginally better but you hate the way it feels, it goes back on the rack. A club you do not trust over the ball will not produce the numbers it produced in the bay.
At the end of the hitting session we sit down and put the recommendation on paper, line by line, with the reasoning next to each entry. Cost is itemised into components and labour so you can see exactly what you are paying for and where.
You keep that sheet regardless of what you decide. If you want to think about it for a week, take it. If you want to have the build done somewhere closer to home, take it there — any competent shop can work from it, and we would rather you got the right clubs than no clubs.
We will also tell you when the honest recommendation is to spend less. If the difference between a premium shaft and a mid-priced one shows up nowhere in your data, that goes on the sheet in writing.
Everything below happens at our bench, by the same person who ran your session. This is the stage the whole studio was designed around.
Heads get gauged the day they arrive, not the day they are assembled. Stamped loft and delivered loft are frequently a few tenths apart, and knowing that before cutting anything lets us adjust the plan rather than discover the discrepancy at the end.
Shafts are trimmed to the chart for that specific model, then abraded back to bare material for the full bonding depth. Skipping the abrasion is the single most common cause of a shaft that comes loose two seasons later.
Epoxy is mixed by weight, not by eye, and clubs cure undisturbed overnight. Rushing a cure to get a club out the door on the same afternoon is how bonds fail in humidity like ours.
Ferrules are turned down on the lathe until the transition into the hosel is genuinely flush, and grips go on with tape build-up matched to your hand size and installed square to the leading edge.
Finished specs are measured, written next to the targets, and verified by the other fitter. If anything sits outside the published windows it goes back on the vise before you get a call.
The session does not really end at handover. Clubs settle, swings adapt, and the first month tells us things the bay could not.
Come back after a handful of rounds and we will re-gauge everything, free. Lie angles in particular can want a small adjustment once you have played real turf rather than a hitting mat.
Every spec, component part number and gauge reading lives in your file indefinitely. Call in three years about a replacement shaft and we can match it without you bringing the club in.
Loft, lie and swing weight verification on clubs we built costs nothing for as long as you own them. There is no annual plan to buy and nothing to sign up for.
No stage of it is secret and none of it is complicated. It is simply done all the way through rather than most of the way through.