If you like to change your golf equipment often, or like to make periodic “tweaks” to your equipment, building your own clubs may be the answer. You can build your own versions of top end clubs for a fraction of what they would cost for you to buy them. You can also try out new concepts on the driving range and “prove the concept” as to whether or not a new type of club may actually help your game. If you are going to build your own clubs, you will need to get a good idea of the golf club components you can purchase and what type of products are available. I will spend a few minutes today familiarizing you with the three main component you can easily purchase in the marketplace.
1. Shafts — There are a large variety of shafts you can buy to build your golf clubs. There are the standard steel shafts that are standard on most “off the shelf” sets of clubs. There are also graphite and composite shafts that are very light and can help people that are not as strong as the typical professional golfer. There are also exotic metal shafts such as titanium, where very stiff shafts can be made for top level golfers that have high club head speed. You can find a huge variety of shafts, and many can be purchased for a very reasonable price.
2. Grips — A lot of golfers I know do their own re-gripping. This is not as technical as building the entire club, and can save you a lot of money. There are a lot of different sizes, diameters, colors and shapes of grips that you can buy. You can also buy “tacky” grips and grips that do very well in wet weather. I recommending that you just buy a few standard grips and learn to to re grip your irons. Once you know how to do this, you can move to different types of grips that tend to cost more. It is a good idea to re-grip all of your clubs once a year, so learning this skill can save you some money each and every year that you golf.
3. Heads — The number and size of heads that are available these days is nothing short of amazing. You can buy some huge driver heads, and the growth of hybrid golf clubs has many new types of heads available for you to experiment with. I like to make drivers with large heads and graphite shafts and see how it hit them. I learned a few years ago that any clubs I build can easily be sold to other golfers. I have sold a lot of drivers, and even a few full sets of irons. I spend most of my time building clubs for myself , but always seem to have an order or two from my golfing buddies.
Buying your own golf club components and putting together your own clubs is rewarding and pretty easy to master. I recommend that you start small and build a driver for yourself to test out the process. You will know after a couple of clubs if this is for you or not. Best of luck on your club building.
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