At My Age Should I Be Playing Steel Golf Shafts?What is your age? I know golfers in their sixties that are still playing steel golf shafts. Steel shafts have made drastic advancements (for the better) in the last four or five years. There are steel shafts available that come very close in weight to the popular graphite shafts, but like everything else, as shafts evolved so did the cost. Some of the high-end steel shafts are comparable in price to graphite shafts. Steel golf shafts will give you instant feedback (stinging sensation when you miss hit), but there are some dampening inserts available to help reduce the shock. When I custom fit someone for steel shafts I always use the wrist to floor measurement as a guide only!!!! Talent, strength and age play a large part in proper steel golf shaft selection. There use to be several different sizes for steel shafts (from .277" to .395") but most of these are very difficult to find. These sizes, if you can find them are left over from the early days of steel shafting and are stuck in some corner in an old warehouse and long forgotten. Besides, finding ferrules for these shafts would be very difficult to say the least, but these old shafts do have one redeeming quality they make great tomato stakes. You are pretty well out of luck if you want to reshaft these heads, my advice, polish them and put them over your fireplace or they make excellent door stops (I use 2 here at the shop). The steel shaft industry has pretty much unified itself and the most common steel shafts are .335", .350", .355" and .370", the last two sizes are the most common steel golf shafts for your irons. The .355" is also known as taper tip - these shafts are club head specific and come pre-labeled and pre-cut with some extra length on the butt end for final fitting. Taper tip shafts are usually sold in sets of eight (3-PW). I have cannibalized as many as three sets, especially when I want to soft step a set of irons, the 2-iron and wedge shafts are sold separately. Soft stepping a set of irons is nothing more than putting the 3-iron shaft into a 4-iron head (and so on), which in turn softens the flex slightly - this usually works very well in the longer irons where distance is more desirable over accuracy. I personally prefer .370" also known as parallel tip. The majority of parallel steel shafts come in a 41" length, but other lengths are also available. With parallel tip shafts, I have more options to fine tune and frequency to your specific shaft flex. This is accomplished by using the True Temper Shaft Lab and a Digiflex frequency meter, letting me tip trim to a specific flex. There are other products that will do the job, these just happen to be my tools of choice. There are two types of steel shafts, stepless and step shafts. Step shafts come with different step patterns and each step pattern has it's own playing characteristic. It will benefit you to search for a qualified Club fitter. Stepless shafts are a smooth steel shaft that also comes in .355" taper tip and .370" parallel tip. One major manufacturer claims this is a highly consistent shaft that transfers more energy from the player to the ball. This manufacture further claims a tighter shot dispersion and a unique solid feel at impact. I have tried them both, and at my level of play (being properly fitted) I could not tell the difference. So if you have the talent to distinguish between step and stepless steel golf shafts and you do have a preference, whether it's visual or feel, by all means play what you like, but you still need to be fitted properly no matter what your age. Leave Steel Golf Shafts Page and Return to SHAFTS Page Back to About Custom Golf Home Page
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