Clone Clubs

Hello all. I am a relative newby to golf but I feel i have reached a level sufficient to invest in a quality driver yet I can't spend a whole bunch of money. I demoed a couple of clubs recently and I really hit the taylormade r5 well yet it's a lil out of reach for me moneywise. I was wondering what is the detriments to the clone for this club?

I am not farmiliar with clone clubs... but I bought a TaylorMade R5 from Golftown.com - a demo club and I paid just over $200.00 Canadian... Golftown and others have ebay sites and there are a few sweet deals. I was at the golf range today, and I i hit a guys's new Great Big Bertha - I think a 454 - a beautiful club, a sweet ping and loads of distance!

James

Most often clone clubs stop at the appearance of the OEM club. The material is sometimes not the same, and the craftsmanship isn't there a lot of the time.

The real test is hitting the clone side-by-side with the OEM. I did that with Nike CPR's and the OEM was consistently longer and straighter than the knockoff.

But enough about that. What you really want to look at is a component club - I've got a sweet SMT Spectrum 10* you can have for much, much less than an R5.

What exactly is a component club?

OEM - original equipment manufactuer
clone - a knock off of an OEM
Component - a company with their own R&D, design and distribution. THey have customer service and produce high quality equipment. Quite often their high end equipment is better that OEM equipment.

If you are looking for component (highly recommended) go for a SMT, Alpha, or my component of choice, Ashton. I have the new MS-5 driver and it is AWESOME.

Which MS5 did you get, Gord?

The Ashton MS-5. Doesn't look oversized at address, great sound off the sweet spot and has a great feel.

Where can i find a dealer close by that has component clubs. I want to demo some and see if they live up to the hype.

Right, Gord, but there's the Draw bias, fade bias, and heavyweight, if I'm not mistaken.

Bonzi, head to you local clubbuilder. S/he's bound to have some component stuff lying around (Bang, Alpha, SMT, SnakeEyes, Dynacraft, Jackaroo, Maltby).

The rule of thumb is if it sounds like an OEM, or looks like an OEM, it's probably a clone (ie TerrorMake Quad7, the Big Betty, Warhawk drivers, etc). Acer is a whole line of clones.

Im familiar with acer. You can tell by looking at the clubs exactly what ones they are supposed to be like. In fact, there might be some at this training facility that i go to.

Ok thanks for the help, that was the answers I was looking for. I have been reading alot of the posts and Gord seems to love ashton, so I will check them out.

The Ashton philosophy certainly can't be beat.

Q: Why only one head? Where's the variety?

A: Our view on this is simple. We've designed the best driver we possibly can and until we can make something better, we won't. We don't understand the practice of introducing multiple heads that all do the same basic thing.

I'm kind of afraid to try the Ashton heads... mostly because I really, REALLY like the look of my Spectrum, and I'm afraid that the Ashton would quite realistically outperform.

Sorry Ben - I have the 9.5* standard head. I have a natural fade that I enjoy watching, but I can easily work the ball right to left when needed, so I figured I would stick with the stadard weighting.

If anyone is interested in looking at what Ashton has on the market, check out their website: www.ashtongolf.com