Hello! First time poste after much lurking 
I have recently aquired a set of 55’ hogan precision long hosels 2-9that i have designs on refinishing to make my playing set… Ive discovered some things on the range with them that have honestly confused me. For starters, my original set i used for many years were some titleist 690 mb irons. had them plus 1/4inch in length and standard lies with original flighted 6.0 rifles. Ive never been a long hitter, w 125yards and then 10 yards up the set so i hit my 5 about 175 or thereabouts on the fly. Id catagorize myself as a swinger, in that i swing about 75% ish and any effort to go harder or softer in tempo seems to just wreck havoc on my striking unless i play everyday… when i flush my old irons the ball feels absent, like i hold it on the face and squash it. my flight is pretty high really, annoyingly so at times and i tend to miss with blocks to the right or an occasional snap hook or 3. Enter the hogan irons
These things are short, which i expected, about an inch shorter than mine, maybe even more than an inch. They also have green stripe true temper rocket shafts in them which i read on here to be quite stiff and heavy. 2 of the irons from the set have a different shaft something dynamic so ill need to reshaft the set. No clue on the lofts or lies but i can tell they are flatter as the first few shots i had some toe heavy divets, which seem to have disappeared after about 10 balls. divet now is just as my old set. the grips are a mix of green victories and some leather wraps that feel thin in my hands and somewhat hard but i hang onto them at any rate. Ball flight is somewhat lower than what im used too, but not ridiculously. no difference in flight of the short irons only in the longs. honestly id say i hit the 5 about 175 (same as my 690’s) with a flatter trajectory. no ballooning, more so piercing which is nice. however impact is more violent. The ball feels like it jumps off the face more? not like im squashing it. think its the shaft? or the old grips? or is this just what a vintage club feels like? its not a bad thing, just different. My confusion is the distance, as it relates to the shaft. im about the same distance really in the 5, 6, 8,9 which is all ive hit. they dont look strengthened a whole bunch in terms of loft. the surprising thing to me is that my shot dispersion is tighter on the hogans. I can really feel where the toe of the club is in my swing with these. Not that they feel heavy at all… the shafts DO feel boardy which again… i dont care for, but im not sure i dont care for it because its a bad thing or because its not quite what im used too… I mean, i like the squashing feeling of no ball, but not at the expense of 3 extra yards of dispersion.
does anyone have any input as to what type of modern shaft would be similar to a true temper rocket? if they were all here i think id just play them honestly but like i said some are missing. Also these irons have some really long hosels, which i kinda like, but how does that effect shaft length and flex when reshafting? im assuming you are gonna have to trim more… whatever goes into these all that hosel is gonna make the tip play way stiffer right? Im not a club maker type so drilling out the pins and reshafting and what not while i try 20 iterations of stuff seems like more than i could do. maybe some suggestions? Keep in mind ive never been a guy that played x shafts in his irons always had been told the tempo of my swing matched with a softer flex. im actually kinda mind blown that i hit the hogans as well as i do for the condition they are in, its almost as if theyve corrected some faults with ball flight ive been fighting for a few years. namely… the snap hook. What id like to avoid is taking a new shaft that weighs whatever it does and plugging it into these heads and jacking up the MOI to the point they get too head heavy, or that beautiful feeling of where the toe is gets lost.
All i know is im hooked on vintage gear!!
Definately lookign forward to persimmons as well. Lots of local courses are just to short anymore even from the tips they are only 6800-6900 yards. But there’s also a fear in picking a real wood driver as i have no frame of reference. Whats good, whats bad, who do i go to when i buy one off ebay that is cracked, refinishing, i feel the need to really do some good research so that i not only understand what an excellent driver fairwaywood is, but tell you why it is that way, and why another isnt as good.