Shaft spining and puring

Could someone please explain, in layman's terms, what is spining a shaft and what is puring a shaft? What is the difference between those two processes? Is one better than the other? Is it something that should be done before you build a club? (i.e., is it neccesary to spine or pure the shaft, or both, like it is neccesary to swingweight a club?) Can you do one or both of those processes at home with a minimal amount of equipement?

I've been doing searches and reading about it, but I still don't fully understand it.

I'm sure I'll have more questions later. Thanks for the help.

Puring: The process of determining the best way to align a shaft in a head. This may include spining, FLOing, or other methods.

Spining: The process of determining where the stiffest part of the shaft is. In a steel shaft, it's where the weld is. The spine influences the flex of the shaft.

FLOing: FLO stands for Flat Line Oscillating. This process is done with a laser. Said laser is attached the tip of the shaft. The shaft is plucked or pushed, and the resulting shaft wobble is seen. The shaft is rotated and plucked until the shaft wobbles in straight or flat line.


I personally rank the importance with FLO being greater than the spine. Once I find the FLO plane (the most stable plane of bending), I then check to see which side is stiffer. I then install the shaft with the stiff side toward target, to improve accuracy.

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Can you FLO a shaft without a lot of fancy equipment?

Cosine,

All you absolutely have to have for FLOing is a way to secure the butt of the shaft, usually with a vise and a butt clamp.

I used a 6" long piece of 2x2 HARDWOOD (soft woods like pine dont last) to make a clamp, drilled thru 5/8" and cut longitudinally. Just be careful not to clamp too tightly with graphite! If you don't use the actual head to find the flat line oscillation you should use a ~205 g drill chuck to weight the tip during testing. I use the actual clubhead and do not need to use a laser to observe the plane of oscillation. I shim the clubhead onto the shaft with plastic (a shaft sleeve), clamp the butt in the vise, pluck the shaft and see whether the clubhead wobbles off of the plane in which it was plucked. Keep rotating the head / shaft until it doesn't wobble off plane. I paid $10 to a clubmaker to have this done once, but never again (since he let me watch what he did for the $10)!

- Scott

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