Lousy Customer Service...

[Tony Covey MGS]

I'm going to disagree with Two Solitudes for the following reason - this guy is a tester for MGS - he knows his swing and his game - if a launch monitor were spitting out numbers that were dramatically different from what he regularly sees he'd comment - It wasn't some blind fitting with a guy who might swing one way one week or another way another week -

 

Regardless I'm where RR and several others are at with this - What's the big deal to the OEM to try and do something to rectify this? Even if it's a meet you halfway or we'll cover the labor or something as a start you have to consider PR in this case - it's going to have a bad ending for the OEM once it's name comes out.

 

Tester in question is a single-digit handicap golfer...He's not only the most consistent, but his ball-flight is the most predictable of any tester we have (which to me anyway, makes the initial fitting rather puzzling). my *guess* (and it's just that), is the fitter decided to go stiffer to try and mitigate what is more right to left movement than the tester usually wants (he's 2* flat on his irons already). Still...

 

Even if I take the OEM friendly position...he waited too long to try and rectify the situation, "we stand behind the fitting", whatever...you'd think they'd be willing to do more/better than $70 a shaft. If somebody suggested it to them, soft-stepping is a decent option, but personally, I like him better in DGs anyway.

[RookieBlue7]

Why do you like him better in DG's? Just curious. The launch properties are the same and the spin rates are eerily similar. The main differences are in feel, IMO, as I've tested and played both. The biggest difference in feel are on mishits, too.

[Tony Covey MGS]

Why do you like him better in DG's? Just curious. The launch properties are the same and the spin rates are eerily similar. The main differences are in feel, IMO, as I've tested and played both. The biggest difference in feel are on mishits, too.

 

My experience has been that the DGs spin just a tad more...we're not talking night and day...similar, but slightly higher. From the KBS line, I'd be more inclined to put him in the standard tour model rather than the C-Taper. Despite the occasional more left to right than he'd like, the spin numbers are solid. I might *try* him another half a degree flat. The C-Taper, I think errors to the wrong side for him (spin).

 

Truthfully, with his tempo and transition, a hard-stepped tour 90 might get it done too. More than anything else...the flex itself is the issue. As I said, my hunch is that when 2 degrees didn't fix all the right to left issues, the fitter decided to see what he could do with flex.

[Will Par]

What he's telling me is that good shots are still good, but the bad ones are worse than they should be.

If you go from a bad fit to a good fit, your good shots should get better, and your bad shots... well bad shots are just that. There should be no expectations from a bad swing. A bad swing can produce any face angle and any type of shaft load and no fitting can anticipate and fix that. If you expect your bad shots to get better from a fitting, you have unrealistic expectations.

 

A fitting shouldn't be a process where someone tells us what is best... it should be a process were we obtain information that allows us to decide what is best. I would have expected a single digit handicap player to know if he liked the shafts that were chosen at the end of the fitting. But that's just my opinion.

 

Finally, there is nothing wrong with the shafts, but there may have been something very wrong with the fitting. Three hours??? That is an immediate concern. I think the OEM should provide another free fitting performed by another expert fitter. Only after that has been done should a decision be made on how to replace the shafts if that is necessary. It would be better to get fit by someone other than the OEM, but that doesn't provide a path to resolve the issue.

 

One of the worst things we can do as golfers is to start doubting our equipment. If you think you can't hit a club, you'll never hit it well. But if you take that same club and decide it's just as good as any other, then you'll be able to hit it as well as your skills allow.

 

If I were in the same situation I would have to shoulder some of the blame myself. If I couldn't get any satisfaction from the OEM, I would decide how to proceed and get the shafts replaced at a reasonable cost. Sometimes fighting to prove you are right and someone else is wrong is more trouble than it's worth.

[Matt Saternus]

In regards to the tester who was fit I'm surprised that he wouldn't have remarked about the recommendation. I like the doctor analogy - I always ask why? Why do you want me on this medicine? Why should I go for that test? Of course I ask it in a way that affirms the doctors knowledge and abilities but ultimately I have a right to know what's going on. I actually talked my way out of going on a very expensive and powerful medicine earlier this year by asking questions. My doctor confered with the cardiologist and he quickly called me back and said, "Don't take it."

 

The same thing holds true for a fitting like this. If something comes up that sounds strange I ask, "Why?" Why do you want to cut two and a half inches off of my putter shaft? Oh, that makes sense or no way you're touching my baby. In this case it made sense - we tried the shorter length putter and found that it moved my eyes exactly where they needed to be.

 

Two part response to this:

 

#1) EVERYONE should be asking "Why?" all the time. Why should I make this swing change? Why should I buy this club? If they can't explain why, then they don't know themselves and you probably shouldn't be taking their advice.

 

#2) The downfall to asking "Why?" is that there are a lot of people who spin good lines of bulls***. The problem with golf (as with many other things) is that a lot of people know just enough to be dangerous. This goes for the VAST majority of fitters and coaches, in my opinion. So, you may ask, "Why?" and get what seems like a really good answer, but unless you know so much that you might as well fit yourself, it's hard to separate the bulls*** from the brilliant.

 

 

OK so I am total novice with all this talk and I have no idea what taped C shafts are or why they matter. But I guess I can understand the reluctance of the OEM to do a full replacement. I know this runs against common knowledge on golf websites, but it seems to me that unless you are a pretty decent player already (and I am talking about low single digits) a fitting is going to be hit and miss no matter where you go. How you swing on Sunday may be nothing like how you were swinging on Thursday.

 

 

Respectfully, I disagree completely. People's swings are much more consistent than they realize, at every level of the game. They may be consistently bad, but they're consistent.

 

Recently we've had a couple threads where guys have been fitting on Flightscope or Trackman and they've seen just how consistent they are. Lower tier players may have a difficult time controlling the club face, but their swing speed, angle of attack, and club path are all pretty consistent from swing to swing.

[Tony Covey MGS]

A little off topic here...

 

I recently fit the tester, in part using Mizuno's shaft optimization system. I've started to dig around a little bit to figure out how it goes about deciding to recommend what it does. It appears flex is determined largely if not totally by swing speed. After a certain number it always recommends X. What's really interesting is how it moves between PX and PXi in various scenarios. Anyway...

 

Without getting too deep into it, and playing with the numbers, it appears that tempo is what Mizuno uses to make a recommendation determination between the KBS Tour and the C-Taper. In the case of an 87 MPH 6-iron swing speed, and a tempo rating of 7+, the recommendation will always be Soft-Stepped C-Tapers, X-100s, and Project X 6.0 (not soft-stepped) (not in that order). The Release factor value will determine whether the optimizer recommends the standard KBS, or PXI or Dynalite XP. All pretty good stuff, and fun to tinker with anyway.

 

One other interesting note, tweaking the numbers one way or another can tweak the order of the recommendations, but I've yet to find a combo that bumps the C-Taper to the top of the list. I suspect this has as much to do with this being a new shaft in the Mizuno lineup as anything else.

 

In the particular case of our tester, the Mizuno system essentially says his tempo isn't quick enough to warrant the C-Taper (logic I like), so it recommends X100s (soft-stepped), PX6.0, and KBS Tour X (soft-stepped). This gels with what I've seen first-hand (slow to moderate tempo players aren't ideal candidates for C-Tapers). Of course, you can never really know without seeing what happens.

 

FYI...Mizuno is not the OEM in question.

[Tony Covey MGS]

If you go from a bad fit to a good fit, your good shots should get better, and your bad shots... well bad shots are just that. There should be no expectations from a bad swing. A bad swing can produce any face angle and any type of shaft load and no fitting can anticipate and fix that. If you expect your bad shots to get better from a fitting, you have unrealistic expectations.

 

A fitting shouldn't be a process where someone tells us what is best... it should be a process were we obtain information that allows us to decide what is best. I would have expected a single digit handicap player to know if he liked the shafts that were chosen at the end of the fitting. But that's just my opinion.

 

Finally, there is nothing wrong with the shafts, but there may have been something very wrong with the fitting. Three hours??? That is an immediate concern. I think the OEM should provide another free fitting performed by another expert fitter. Only after that has been done should a decision be made on how to replace the shafts if that is necessary. It would be better to get fit by someone other than the OEM, but that doesn't provide a path to resolve the issue.

 

One of the worst things we can do as golfers is to start doubting our equipment. If you think you can't hit a club, you'll never hit it well. But if you take that same club and decide it's just as good as any other, then you'll be able to hit it as well as your skills allow.

 

If I were in the same situation I would have to shoulder some of the blame myself. If I couldn't get any satisfaction from the OEM, I would decide how to proceed and get the shafts replaced at a reasonable cost. Sometimes fighting to prove you are right and someone else is wrong is more trouble than it's worth.

 

There are bad swings...and then there are near misses. This particular tester doesn't produce many bad swings, so I believe it's those near misses with the differences are most noticeable (of course, the new heads could also play a role in that).

 

And yeah...3 hours (actually it was longer than that), borders on insane.

 

I understand what you're getting at when you say a single handicap golfer should know if he likes the shaft, but is it really that cut and dry. We're not talking about a gearhead here, we're talking about a guy who just happens to be pretty good at golf. The thing is, he's got a fitter who basically said "these are the right clubs for you". Ultimately he chose to trust the fitter...I mean the guy works for the company and he spent over 3 hours fitting him, he must be right...right? Or so I think that's the logic.

[Matt Saternus]

There are bad swings...and then there are near misses. This particular tester doesn't produce many bad swings, so I believe it's those near misses with the differences are most noticeable (of course, the new heads could also play a role in that).

 

And yeah...3 hours (actually it was longer than that), borders on insane.

 

I understand what you're getting at when you say a single handicap golfer should know if he likes the shaft, but is it really that cut and dry. We're not talking about a gearhead here, we're talking about a guy who just happens to be pretty good at golf. The thing is, he's got a fitter who basically said "these are the right clubs for you". Ultimately he chose to trust the fitter...I mean the guy works for the company and he spent over 3 hours fitting him, he must be right...right? Or so I think that's the logic.

 

And even gearheads can fall in love one day only to wake up realizing that something is totally and utterly wrong for them (I may or may not speak from experience here ).

 

To finish the thought I started with RK, at some point you need to trust the fitter unless you are confident you know more than he does (and if you know more than him, you're probably fitting yourself anyway). Most people, at some point, are going to take that leap of faith. When it turns out that the fitter you are trusting did a bad job, the company that empowered the fitter needs to make the decision about how to handle it.

[GolfSpy Tim]

I've definitely been fitted into something that appeared to work, and then a few weeks later on the course after fighting the new gear come to realize that it's not the right fit.

 

Sucks that the OEM is playing such a hard line here.

 

Not that it's the "right" thing, but I vote the guy and/or you out the OEM and head to ebay or a friend to pick up some shafts and move on. If the OEM can't handle it, they deserve the backlash they have coming.

[RoverRick]

And even gearheads can fall in love one day only to wake up realizing that something is totally and utterly wrong for them (I may or may not speak from experience here ).

 

 

I could not agree more. I did this with the C Tapers in X flex. as I said in an earlier post. It was not that they were producing bad shots. It was just that if I did not have my best stuff or was tired, I could not get the consistant distance out of them. One of the interesting things is that since I went back to the X100s as my gamers, I have gained distance the last two day.

 

I will be putting these C Tapers in the Hogan heads next week. I just have not taken time to reassemble the back up set. I really hit the Mizzies and X100s well today, considering it was 50 degrees and 20+ mph wind. I putted like crap, but it was not the shafts fault.

 

One of the interesting things to me is that I love the looks of the Rifle shafts. I do not like the stepped shafts looks. However, after many failed attempts, I find that the Rifles do not fit my swing as well as the Dynamic Golds. I sure wish I would have learned this a couple of years ago. It sure would have saved me some money.

[Kanoito]

Without getting too deep into it, and playing with the numbers, it appears that tempo is what Mizuno uses to make a recommendation determination between the KBS Tour and the C-Taper. In the case of an 87 MPH 6-iron swing speed, and a tempo rating of 7+, the recommendation will always be Soft-Stepped C-Tapers, X-100s, and Project X 6.0 (not soft-stepped) (not in that order). The Release factor value will determine whether the optimizer recommends the standard KBS, or PXI or Dynalite XP. All pretty good stuff, and fun to tinker with anyway.

 

That is strange. My numbers were 85-4-3-5-5 with a 6 iron and my recommendations were all in the S flex. KBS Tour S, S300 and PX forgot which one.

The guy even said I needed a couple of mph more to really take advantage of the S300, so he put me in the KBS Tour S.

 

I didn't think a difference of 2mph would draw the line between S and X.

[kygolfer1980]

First off this is in no way a $560 problem for the OEM. I bought heads, and I bought shafts, and ferrules and grips and did my own. I went with KBS C Tapers in X flex. The only real problem I had was that there were some days when I just could not get the full distance out of them. I decided I needed to soft step them. It cost me $35 for a new shaft and I had to use another ferrule and $3 per dozen and another $8 grip. And I am buying these at retail. So if I can soft step all my clubs for less than $50, the OEM darn sure can. I can understand the price if the customer wants to change them from KBS to DG.

 

I will say that soft stepping them made a huge difference. I do not over power them like I did the stiffs but I can also play 36 holes without losing a full club in distance by the end of the round.

 

Oh yeah, you also have to remove the grips and butt trim but I liked mine a 1/2" long anyway so I got over that pretty quickly.

Can u explain to me what "soft stepping" is? I have read the term but am not familiar with it. Thx!

[Kanoito]

Can u explain to me what "soft stepping" is? I have read the term but am not familiar with it. Thx!

 

http://forum.mygolfspy.com/topic/7095-dumb-question-for-you-gear-heads/

 

Question asked 2 days ago.

[kygolfer1980]

http://forum.mygolfspy.com/topic/7095-dumb-question-for-you-gear-heads/

 

Question asked 2 days ago.

Thx, makes sense. Tony, I guess the Mizuno shaft optimizer tells u if a shaft needs soft or hard stepped or is that something u picked up from experience? My top 3 recommendations were 1. DG S300 2. Project X 5.5 3. KBS Tour C Taper 120's. Just curious as to how u know. Thx...