I’ve been working on this set of Apex and had been dreading facing the shaft pins. I’m sure this has been discussed before, but I figured i’d share what I found as it ended up being a lot easier than I thought.
I used a flat headed 3/32" pin punch- flat works best as pointy just spreads the pin in the hole. The first few hammer hits have to be fairly accurate as it’s flat on round, but it’s relatively easy to make an impression- you can feel it protrude slightly on the other side, or not. Once you get a groove to start in, then it’s just a matter of keeping the pin punch in line and the hammer hits true, as well as a steady club. I used a few blocks of wood and my foot to trap the shaft- I also tried a vice but it wasn’t all that necessary. That size pin punch fits exactly through the pin hole- I’m not sure if shaft pins were standard sizes across all manufacturers.
When you get the pin half way through, some of them just kept going and some got kind of jammed. It’s a bit counterintuitive, but a little heat got things moving and the ones that were jammed just went right through- not a shaft removing amount heat, just a few seconds on each side to make things pliable and not expand too much. I found that pulling on the pin with a pliers doesn’t work very well even when there’s a lot of it to grab. They all had to be hammered all the way through with the punch.
As an aside, they are 355 taper tip and DG X100’s fit perfectly… I was thinking some sort of thread documenting specs on irons people have worked on might be a cool resource- maybe there’s one already that I don’t know about…
Cheers…
If you can’t get a pin out… simply cut the shaft a few inches from the hosel, and drill it out from the inside through the cut shaft. Then heat up the hosel and wait till you see smoke, that will tell you the epoxy is toast, then pull out the remaining shaft by putting the head in a vice and twist off the head with a kitchen mitt.
do you need to drill the pins from the sides of the hosel to loosen them up or will the heating / twisting of the hosel be enough to get rid of the remnants of the pins on the side?
You may want to custom make a short pin punch maybe 1/4" long to start the initial punching process. The shorter punch won’t bend too easily and is controllable. Also, secure the exposed part of a stuck pin in the vise and simply lever it out if it gets stuck. You can get good quality aluminum rod from the welding supply house in the correct diameter for new pins and it is plenty strong enough when coupled with a good epoxy. MR