Dynamic Gold Question

[DiscipleofPenick]

What's the difference between DG X100 and DG Tour Issue X100?

You can throw numbers and terms at me. I currently play X100 in my irons after playing S300 for the previous 15ish years. And I'm really happy with the shafts. I'm looking at a newer set on eBay and they have the tour issue shafts.

Thanks spies

[cnosil]

17 minutes ago, DiscipleofPenick said:

What's the difference between DG X100 and DG Tour Issue X100?

You can throw numbers and terms at me. I currently play X100 in my irons after playing S300 for the previous 15ish years. And I'm really happy with the shafts. I'm looking at a newer set on eBay and they have the tour issue shafts.

Thanks spies

As I understand,  it is tighter tolerances.   They are the same shaft, the tour issue are just more consistent

[RickyBobby_PR]

1 hour ago, DiscipleofPenick said:

What's the difference between DG X100 and DG Tour Issue X100?

You can throw numbers and terms at me. I currently play X100 in my irons after playing S300 for the previous 15ish years. And I'm really happy with the shafts. I'm looking at a newer set on eBay and they have the tour issue shafts.

Thanks spies

Tour issue is a .5g tolerance in weight compared to 1-2g for the standard DG shafts. 
 

The x100 will weigh the same as the Tour issue x100z the s400 are 134 which is 2g heavier than the s300 which is where the tolerances come in. S200 will be 127.  The s400 tour issue are 130g

[DiscipleofPenick]

12 hours ago, RickyBobby_PR said:

Tour issue is a .5g tolerance in weight compared to 1-2g for the standard DG shafts. 
 

The x100 will weigh the same as the Tour issue x100z the s400 are 134 which is 2g heavier than the s300 which is where the tolerances come in. S200 will be 127.  The s400 tour issue are 130g

Thanks. I'm really happy with the performance of the x100 I play now, I kind of fit myself into that shaft. Good to know I can expect the same from the tour issue.

[jaskanski]

Oh boy. If there's one question that gets asked more times about a shaft than any other, then this is right up there.

As previously mentioned, it's weight sorted to a greater tolerance than the "regular" Dynamic Gold shaft - +/- 0.5g is the usual tolerance, but it's also important to discern the reason behind it.

Back in the day when True Temper developed the original veneral "Dynamic" shaft, it instantly made a positive impact with players both on the pro circuit and the amateur ranks. When it was noticed that some inconsistencies could be perceived on mass produced sets of shafts, True Temper further devolped the shaft by weight sorting them to a higher tolerance - at the time about +/- 2g for each flex category. This weight sorting was where the term "Dynamic Gold" came from - it was the basic same production batch of shafts but sorted to give better weight tolerance between each shaft and hence give better consistency - remembering in discrete sets of irons with taper tip .355" it's a constant weight shaft and in constant length parallel tip .370" blanks it has the same starting weight (until you trim it).

Fast forward to the modern era when taper tip became the preferred norm for club manufacturers (for ease of assembly tolerances and labour techiniques to trim to length) it was noticed on the advanced ranks of precision club building that the DG shaft could be further refined by weight sorting it even finer to the +/- 0.5g that custom built SETS could benefit from. That's right - SETS.

The whole point  of building (and more accurately blueprinting) sets of irons to a high tolerance is to ensure the flex progression between each descending length iron remains as constant as possible. It's pretty pointless to have just 1 Tour Issue iron shaft in a set (eg a wedge?) because it won't be matched to anything else in terms of flex. For Dynamic Gold weight = flex in pure and simple terms. If it's heavier than it's next counterpart shaft, the flex will be stiffer - eg a 130g shaft will be stiffer than a 129g shaft - even from the same flex category of S300. At 134g it becomes S400 - stiffer still.

So when a set is built to a tight tolerance in terms of every component that goes to make it - head, shaft, grip - even the ferrule, the glue or whatever - it's flex can be guaranteed to be more consistent for each given shaft. Hence the reason why Tour Issue shafts were (at least originally) sold only in matched tolerance sets.  Each shaft in the set of 8 were weight matched to be within 0.5g of each other. Ironically, it didn't mean different Tour Issue sets were matched the within 0.5g of any other set - only individual matched sets were guaranteed to be on spec - so if you're using one shaft from one matched set batch and using another from a different batch, watch out because it won't be on the same tolerance simply because TT don't have the resources (or the stock for that matter) to weight sort every single shaft they produce. It only weight sort shafts into sets of 8 from a broader spectrum of +/- 2g shafts!

Still with me? Here's the final piece of truth - if you build a set of without paying attention to the same level of tolerance than the Tour Issue can provide (ie 0.5g) then you've probably wasted your money because in order to get the best out of a weight matched set, you also need to weight match everything you're using (remember the heads, grips, glue etc) to take advantage of the flex consistency on offer. Blueprinting is the concept to build to this level of accuracy and will provide a great set of irons. Don't even start talking about spine aligning to get frequencies to match because that's a whole different can o' worms and the stories of the "Tour Issue screen lables are only applied after shafts have been spine aligned" are equal bunk. But we like to play what the pros play right?

Edited October 20, 2021 by jaskanski

[DiscipleofPenick]

Thanks @jaskanski that's a great ton of detail and really helps me to understand the logic and importance behind the tour issue shaft. Though if I thought I could detect a +/- 2g difference in shafts, let alone .5g, I guess I'd be a lot further along in life.