New Gear from Lags Lab

So I went over to lags lab…and we retro fitted some clubs.

We actually retrofitted my set of Taylormade RAC TP MB Irons. These have project x 5.5s in them and half cord grips. For those of you who arent familiar with them they are set of irons that taylormade produced for the better ball striker and they are a few years old. You can check them out here. taylormadegolf.eu/irons/rac- … irons.html

So lag and i took them to shop and bent them flat and added weight to them via lead in the head of the club. we added weight in the “Feel pockets” you can see them in the above link.

Prior to the weight being added and the lie adjustments to the clubs, I hit them high, I mean really high I was constantly working to try to keep the ball down as well as keep the ball from spinning all over the place. These clubs were difficult to control (in comparison to the retrofitting)with my major miss being a pull to pull hook. Now… I know that it wasnt just the lie adjustments because we only added the weight to the 6 iron.

With the clubs that haven’t had the weight added, I still hit them high but with way less spin. Additionally, I feel any off center hit way more and the results are much worse. With the weight added in the 6 iron its like I’m taking a sledge hammer and just smashing it in the back of the ball. Additionally i didn’t hit a shot that i classified as bad. All shots were approximately 160yds (I had a 1 club head wind) and within 20ft of each other left to right. Not bad for a first outing with new loft and lie adjustments and not learing exactly how to aim these things. I know I hit a few balls off center on the 15 balls i hit with the 6 iron but none of them had results that I couldn’t live with. oh and that pull hook…yeah its gone. I had to intentionally try to hit a draw and I sure didn’t have to worry about a hook cause I could barely get the ball to move let alone hit a hook.

Additionally I got to thinking about my driver. I have an R9 super deep driver with the removable head inserts. So…I once again added weight to that. Before the weight this club was relatively inconsistent. But after adding just about as much weight as possible to the head via heavier inserts and then adjusting the lie (its only 2 degrees flat but thats the best i could do) well…its like unloading a sledge hammer into the ball. Its long, its straight, and I hope it doesn’t rain this weekend so I can get out on the course with the new custom sticks from lags lab.

The irons are a knock off from the 1950’s MacGregor M65 through M85 series with the triangle weight behind the sweetspot.
They are forged and we melted 2 one ounce fishing weights into each side pocket. Once melted, they popped out like coming out of a mold, then just used epoxy to mount them in. The modern forged metal on these was fine, and it was a breeze to bend them down 6 degrees. It’s an easy enough retrofit to do… once they are bent down.

Let me know when you get them all done, then we can do a final tweaking to get them all balanced up precisely.

jfischer13,
Thanks for posting your experiment and preliminary results. This is a very interesting approach to going “classic”.
Best,
1teebox

I started work on the rest of the set yesterday. Got out the blow torch and the lead weights.

I then remembered when I was young how my dad and I had made a really heavy putter by taking the head of the putter and drilling small holes in the mallet and filling them with lead.

Do any of you think this might work in this application? Drilling small holes through the club Maybe around the large chuck of metal behind the sweet spot and adding the lead there?

Normally I wouldn’t care and Id just slap the lead on the back but I think it might be nice to not have weight hanging off the back of the club and to have more weight within the club.

Any thoughts?

JF
I dont know how much do you have to add. You can use hosel weights upto 20g (take the hosel outand fits in nicely avaialble at Golfworks/golfmith). You can also add some lead powder into the shaft at the same time. Thats how Twomaster did it (actually Don White did it for him).

Adding weight down the shaft, as well as adding weight just wherever on the club, can really change the dynamics of the club in a way that may not be favorable. I’ve seen pros get very upset at the manufacturer of their clubs when the player finds out lead was added down the shaft to increase the static weight and/or swing weight.

What weight did you end up with in the driver? be interested in what you ended up fitting and the eventual SW

Best to keep the weight behind the ball and not down the shaft. The shaft weights are fine for swing weighting which is more of a feel sensation for the player, and not so much for the dynamics of impact because you could have a very heavy club for instance, but if you added butt weighting to the grip end, you could end up with a very light swing weight.

What you want is weight in the head behind where you hit the ball. You need a firm enough shaft to handle the weight, and in this case, these shafts are plenty stiff.

I need to add about 2 ounces of weight. Its quite a bit. Im thinking i might just put them on there the way lag and I did it the first time. I might try to find a set that looks close to these on ebay and see if I cant add the weight within club per drilling the small holes. As an experiment at least. I don’t want to mess up the set that I have as I can see that these clubs are going to be great.

Whole Jobs…I dont have a way to measure the swing weight of the driver but I do know its heavy. Really heavy. I tried to match the feel in my hand to the weighted 6 iron so Im relatively certain its around e5 but i don’t really know. If lag lets me I may be able to throw the driver on his machine after I get the set finished up.

I agree with lag on the weighting though I think behind the ball is best which is why i thought of adding the weight directly into the club. Not sure if that will compromise the integrity of the head which is my main concern.

As for the new sets. Probably wont get them done until after Christmas as I have 2 weeks of medical exams coming up and then a little vacation time in washington state.

Thanks for all the replies,

JFischer13

j,

You could probably save yourself a lot of time and money just by buying an old set of MacGregors off ebay. Then you will have a much better starting product. Adding that much weight is not the easiest thing to do, especially behind the sweetspot, cause it can often fall off eventually.

I guess you could probably get a few sets for the same price that you could trade in your TMs.

NRG

Good advice

Personally I would not be [too] concerned with messing up the looks any club in the bag…as long as your modification improves your swing and your game. That said, it’s always nice to have a good looking set of clubs…but, having a good looking set of clubs without visual modifications should come in a distant 2nd place to the clubs’ feel and performance.

Greg Norman has used the same 3 wood for 20 years. The crown of his club is missing half the black paint. It looks like an old beat-up $2.00 club you’d find in a bargain barrel that you wouldn’t give a second glance at. It wasn’t all that many years ago that most all the pros had weight tape on their iron clubheads (and even their woods) to fine-tune the club’s feel and performance. Did they care what their clubs looked like? Not one bit! The lead tape modifications was actually a thing of beauty I thought. Nowadays the club manufacturers that sponsor tour pros are better able (and willing), with the aid of computers, to build clubs exactly as their player wants them without adding weight down the shaft or noticeably affecting the physical looks of the clubs’ basic design they sell to the public.

I would guess it’s somewhat rare even today that tour players play with the exact same clubs offered the public, even when a customer custom orders. That’s why some of the tour pros still play with the same club models they played years ago - most I’d say being either Mizuno models or Titleist pro models. I would also guess that (like Tiger Woods) many of the top players that are offered lucrative contracts (to play a manufacturer’s club brand) demand that their clubs be made to match their needs exactly - like a little different grind here-or-there in the heel area, maybe a tweaked toe radius, offsets of course, maybe a slightly different bounce or raking, a heavier static clubhead, a slight COG weight adjustment to affect ball flight, etc., etc., which of course means the club manufacturer must be willing to pretty much hand-make these players’ clubs with the help of computers and sophisticated equipment. And of course there’s the all-important lie angle, shaft characteristics, shaft tipping, etc. and the grip (that are easily changed) that makes the club complete. Of all the club manufacturers today I’d say that Mizuno comes closer to offering irons that need the least amount of modifications to satisfy most of the best golfers.

I still like playing around with lead tape to fine-tune the feel and tweak the results…and don’t mind the looks of having lead tape on my irons.

I have no problem with lead or how its makes a club look (I have glued Pound (£) coins onto clubs before). But adding 2 ounces to a clubhead behind the sweetspot is going to me a big ask. Much better to start off with an already heavy club and fine tune it with a little bit of lead, rather than try to whack on that much weight to a light club. 2 ounces is a whole lot of lead.

yeah I probably could but I just love the shafts that are in the tms so much and its not that hard to add the weight in.

If you look at the link in the first post you can see where im adding the weight. Into the pockets which are next to the sweet spot.

im going to pick up some macs. But Im short on cash at least until the end of this semester and dont really want to fool around with buying new clubs at the moment.

Dream set MAcs with Project x 6.0 and half cord grips. i have been thinking about a set of those since i met lag that day on the island…

Plus some weight and a little epoxy…its like 20 bucks.

J

JF
I have a set of Ram Featherlite blades with Rifle 5.5 shaft at my vacation place alongwith some perrsimmons. Recently I asked someone to measure their weights and all of the irons were about 2 ounces lighter than the heavy sets I am using now. I went through the same process of thinking how to add that much weight on my trip in February. Ultimately I decided it was too much and instead bought some Wilsons that I will bring with me.
Getting a set of Macs may be cheaper than what you are spending on the weights and yo can put your favourite shafts in them and still get a good buck for your Racs (thats waht I am going to do with the Rams; let the unaware play the lighter stuff). I got a set of Mac VIP limited for $11 last week. If it works out I plan to donate them to be placed at LV National so any stry ABSers (including me) can have proper gear if they want to play them. My favorite set of mac M75 I got it for $17. Go figure!

My only worry about these VIPS is they might have aluminum shafts as I dont see any steps on them, in which case they are garbage. Too cheap to ask the seller.
!B93MD0wBWk~$(KGrHqYOKnUEy0FyLLskBM7!oIR(kg~~_12.jpg

Macs,

At first glance I don’t think those are aluminum shafts… they look too small in diameter. The al shafts I remember were quite a bit larger diameter relative to steel.

robbo

Agree. Those shafts appear to have some sheen, which indicates they are steel. Aluminum shafts always have a dull or muted finish with no shine, and the color is light gray instead of a shiny silver color or mirror-like.

Hey guys,

First off, the clubs are pretty much done weight has been added and they seem to match the 6 iron that lag and I made in his lab. I added some extra weight in the wedges and they feel really nice.

Im going to start looking for a set of those macs and a set of persimmons to make a vintage bag.

As for trading in the RACS well…they sorta have some sentimental value to me. I broke 80 for the first time with this set this summer and I really do love the feel of the clubs. They are so soft and I plan to keep them forever. Just cause im emotionally attached to them. Its sorta like your first love…hard to let go of I guess…

the addition of the weight came out pretty well although im sure i will constantly be adding or subtracting weight based off of the feel of the clubs when I get them out to the course. The glue I used is clear and heat sensitve so if I do end up selling them I can just take the weights out and get rid of them on ebay or some place like that.

Do you guys have any suggestions on a heavily weighted head that would work on some project x shafts? I was thinking the mac 75s or so like lag had said my racs were a knock off of.

Open to any suggestions,

JFIscher

Buying off of E-bay is kind of lottery; as there are variations even in older irons (A lot of older irons were custom made for guys planted already). Having said that we havent seen Macs which are too light. If you can get the seller to tell you the total weight on a 5 iron and its more than 435G (15.4 Oz) you should be good.

sounds good I will keep an eye out. Thanks

I will let you know how the experiment worked out, Im hoping for an afternoon session at the mare tomorrow.

J