Driver help please

i have big bertha III, 5, 3 and 11 degree driver. i am about to through the driver in the trash.

i can hit the 5 and 3 straight as an arrow. the 3 goes an average of 230 to 250 with little effort, just nice smooth control swing. but the driver which makes this big smack noise wont pass the 3 wood with the same tempo of swing. if i swing harder it goes straight then the big slice. Even though its only an inch longer than the three it feels ackward.

all in all the 3 and 5 feel controled, good and fun to hit.

is it me or the club?

thanks
pat

I would spend the 15$ and have a shop compare the shaft flex in all the woord and make sure thay are all the same.

Then if thay are, you really only have to point at 1 thing...your swing. If they are different, and the driver is stiffer (will cause slices and loss of distance in most cases) then demo a comperable flex driver to your 3W.

If you cannot hit any of the demos, you again have to point to the swing.

So, what are some of the keys:

* Ball position. Your 3W will be a little closer to the center then the driver, which should be just inside the leading heal. Too far forward, and you start to slide to the ball causing exsessive sway and a loss in consistancies.

* Angle of Attack. The woods like to be very shallow. Irons like to be steep. You regulate this with the use of the hands at the point of impact. For woods to keep a shalow angle of attack on the ball, start the swing with a very long and low sweep of the club along the ground using your shoulder turn only. When the shoulders rotate 90 degrees, you may begin to raise the arms. Then let the hands set to the top. Don't get agressive to set them, because you are not going to release them agressively. Your power is going to come from the full rotation of the hips, then the shoulders through the ball. The hands will release at the ball, but only enough to get them square to the ball.

* Balance. While going this agressive turn, it is very easy to start to get unbalanced by using the legs in a lateral move towards the ball. This will cuase your body to be moved lateraly. Keep the lateral movement to a minimum and make sure you are rotating onto the front foot and all your balance it centered on that foot at the point of impact and in the pose at the end.

* Tee hight. Make sure the ball it 1/2 above the ball and 1/2 below when the club is resting on the ground behind the ball at address. Too low, and you do not get a good sweep up on the ball. Too high and you fight to keep the club released fully.

These are the general keys to make sure you are driving the ball correctly. If you STILL are having problems after doing these correctly, we will have to get feedback from you about more details to help further.

Good luck! I hope it is the club, because it sounds like your 3W is good and the driver swing is very close to that type of swing.

Thanks so much Greg

question, would the flex difference be that much if all three were steel shafts? (i forgot to mention that in my original post) i dont know what they offered when they were available as i believe they are no longer made. i bought the 3 and 5 wds at one store and the driver several months later at another with no thought that there would be a difference in flex of a steel shafted woods and driver.

thanks
pat

Steel / graphite / any shafts can all be very different in flex and even the location of that flex. So now everything is pointing to the shafts. Get them checked.

hi

i went to get the flex checked and the guy who could do it was not around. the pro in the shop insisted it was because i was using steel and not graphite shafts.

he went on to say that compared to steel, graphite shaft irons are more acturate than steel shafts and that i should give up on steel and invest in graphite.

i have never heard this before. i knew or heard the graphite were better on the hands and dampened vibration better. he went on to say that on the fair way that given a 20 yard lee way, they were in the middle more and more acurate than the steel irons and drivers, "thats why they are more exspensive"? heck i thought it was due to there material and the difficulty in making them as apposed to steel.

so he gave me a grahphite shaft club supposedly the same as i have to try out and it did the same, slice, slice slice.

so i gave it back to him and went back to the driving range with my clubs and started working..

like i said earlier the 3 wood, boom, easy comfortable swing and the ball goes straight

so i pick up the driver and bingo it goes straight then slice. so i experiment with different swings planes and notice that the club feels much heavier over all than the 3 wood though its only 1 inch longer.

in comparson to the 3 wood, the 3 wood looks like and feels the old persimum i learned to play with as a child or teenager. but the driver feels much heavier with the weight balance a little further down the shaft or toward the end than the 3 wood.

does anyone else notice this?

because of the weight balance the back swing feels over extended or harder to keep in balance with the rest of my body.
when all is in snyc the ball goes straight and long, 300 yards +, but 90 percent of the strikes on the driving range are a slice or hook, more slice than hooks.


i guess i need more practice with it. golf is like a penilty game. ya only have one chance at the t box, and if its bad, its really bad, its its good, great. so for me, untill i figure this damn thang out, i will playing with the 3 wood.

pat

just read the whole post. i have excactly the same problem as you do. i hit my 3 wood fine and my 5 wood good as well. so when i think i am swinging well on the course i will try the last hole with the 1 wood and then it fades right. big slice. real bad and has no distance. will be havin a lesson or 2 in the near future. so i can fix the prob. im struggling to make greens in 2 or 3 because of lack of distance. and its only 30-60mtrs pending on shots.

The guy at the shop you talked to is an idiot. Graphite and steel both have different flexes and flex points. Simply changing to a graphite will only fix the problem if the right shaft is put in. This guy was only trying to make a sale.

If you prefer steel, kthen stick with steel. Going back to the clown in the shop, steel is much more accurate than graphite as well. Graphite is lighter and will create faster swing speeds which will produce more distance, but at a cost of lost accuracy.



My advice is to wait until the guy who KNOWS what he is talking about is there to discuss your club.

__________________
Gord

Quote of the month:
"It's easy to see golf not as a game at all but as some whey-faced, nineteenth-century Presbyterian minister's fever dream of exorcism achieved through ritual and self-mortification." ~Bruce McCall

I was hoping that i wouldn't be the only person in this site ti insult the guy at the shop. I have a perfect example. One of my teammates has graphite shaft irons and for some reason he had to get a new 6 iron. He instead got a steel shaft and has 3 times the accuracy as he did with the graphite 6. I wont get a graphite set of irons.......i hit decently far with the ones i have now and control is #1 on my list right now..steel is for me!