FERS GAUCHES TAYLORMADE R9 (2009)/ 5-PW/REGULAR KBS TOUR en ligne 90 ARBRES

• BRAND: TAYLORMADE
• MODEL: R9 (LEFT HAND)
• YEAR OF RELEASE: 2009
• SET MAKE UP:5-PW

1. DIY LENGTH AND LIE ANGLE CUSTOM FITTING FOR IRONS AND WEDGES AND WHY THEY ARE VERY IMPORTANT.

- The lie angle of a golf club is the angle created between the shaft and the sole of the clubhead when the club is in the address position.

Getting the correct lie angles in your irons and wedges for your own individual stance and swing is very important because the soles of the clubheads need to be square to the ground at impact to allow you hit the ball out of the middle of the clubface and at the target.

- If you buy a set of irons (or wedges) and the lie angles are either too upright or too flat for you, then in many cases you will be able to adjust your stance to suit the lie angles of your clubs in order to get the soles of the clubheads square to the ground at impact. You can do this by either standing taller, or more bent over with more knee bend because doing either of those will either raise or lower your hands at impact, but changing your stance is not ideal if you like to stand a particular way. The third last photo on this listing shows two extreme examples of a very tall and very bent over stance.

- Lie angles can be adjusted on any iron or wedge by using a loft/lie machine which most club pros have, for around £3-5 per club. However, many club pros are super cautious and will not make loft or lie angle adjustments on cast irons out of fear of breaking your clubs and being held responsible. (A clubmaker on YouTube adjusted the lie angle of a cast iron by 7 degrees before the club broke). Forged irons are easier to bend but many club pros will only bend by a maximum of two degrees in either direction.

Step 1:

- Use Ping's colour code chart to give you a good estimate of what lie angle spec you need in your irons and wedges, even if you are buying from another brand. To watch a good youTube video on this, please do a youTube search for ‘2017 Ping chart' and watch the first youTube result.

- This estimate will give you a good estimate if you buy a set of irons which are standard length. According to Ping this estimate will get you within plus or minus 1 degree of your required lie angle spec 75% of the time and within plus or minus 2 degrees 95% of the time.

- Ping also give club length recommendations based on your height, but club lengths are just a recommendation and are not super important, but lie angles are.

Method:

1. Wear normal shoes (without big heels) and have a friend measure the straight up and down distance between your wristand the floor in inches when you are standing upright with your hands hanging down naturally by your sides.(Just to be clear, you want to measure from where you hand meets your wrist, ie the wrist crease).
2. Do a google image search for ‘Ping colour code chart' and look at the first image result.
3. Match up your ‘wrist to floor' measurement with a lie angle specification. This is the recommended lie angle spec required for you if you buy a set of irons which are standard length, regardless of what height you are.

1. Do a youTube search for ‘DIY lie angle check' and watch the first youTube result by ‘50 yards longer' which is a short, helpful video that shows you how to do the test.
2. You need to use either a good whiteboard marker or a good permanent marker pen, but using a permanent marker pen will require more effort to clean the lines off your clubfaces.
3. Do this test off either a range mat or use a tee when on grass. You can do it with either all of your irons and wedges, or to save time you could do it with perhaps three or four clubs instead such as a long iron, mid iron, short iron and shortest wedge. If the lines are not going straight up and down the clubfaces then leave the lines on the clubfaces and hand all of your clubs to your club pro to make lie the required angle adjustments which should cost £3-5 per club.
4. Clean the lines off the clubfaces afterwards using water and a sponge scourer or cloth and then dry the clubheads using a towel.

- I would advise anyone who is unsure of what new or second hand iron set they should buy to get custom fit for irons. This is more important to do if you are planning to spend significant money on your clubs and your scoring is important to you. In most cases, every time you buy and sell an iron set it will cost you significant money just to change clubs so it's good if you can buy a suitable iron set on your first purchase.

- There are different types of custom fitting available but before paying to get custom fit I advise first checking that you will be able to try out a significant number of different shaft and clubhead options. The biggest problem with custom fitting is that it's mainly only geared towards trying and buying the latest brand new irons but you can still use it to your benefit if you would like to buy a second hand set afterwards on eBay for considerably less money than what a new set would cost.

- In my opinion the most important thing to learn from a custom fitting session for irons is what sort of weight of shaft you most prefer in your irons, followed by shaft flex.This is because getting a suitableshaft in your irons for your own individualswing and weight preferences is more important than getting suitable clubheads becauseshaft weight can significantly affect your ability to consistently hit the ball out of the middle of the clubface.The shaft weight is the biggest factor that affects how heavy or light the club feels to you when you swing it and in general, if the shaft weight is too light for you then your consistency of ball striking will be bad (particularly when you are nervous) and your bad shots will be bigger misses compared to heavier weight shafts. If the shafts are too heavy for you then you will likely not hit the ball as far but you may well be more accurate than lighter weight shafts. All iron clubheads will perform almost equally well when you hit the ball out of the middle of the clubface but the most forgiving clubheads will outperform the less forgiving ones, for both carry distance and accuracy. (I am not sure how much of a difference this actually is because without robot testing it's very hard to know because very few golfers are consistent enough to test that properly, but I think that it's made out to be bigger difference than it actually is).

- I believe that all of the well known brands of clubheads make almost equally good clubs and they all will sell very similar clubhead options from one brand to the next (from a set of non forgiving musclebacks at one end to a set of very forgiving cavity backs at the other end and there will be 2-3 sets in between those two extremes with variable levels of forgiveness, clubface size and offset. You will be able to find an almost identical set of older, second hand irons on eBay to your most preferred clubheads at your custom fitting session because the top brands of clubheads release a new range of iron sets every two years or so with very minor tweaks made. The ‘type' of clubheads you choose in your irons should be mainly decided by how much forgiveness you want on off-centre hits, followed by the clubs that you like the look of when the clubs are in the address position.Please read my guide on ‘different types of golf irons available and the differences between them' if you would like more information on this.

- Please note that the lofts of irons between different iron models can vary considerably. For example, the loft of a 7 iron could be anywhere between 26 and 35 degrees, so whenever you are trying to compare distances between different iron clubheads you can't properly compare them for carry distances unless you know what the loft is. With irons and wedges the most important thing is to be able to consistently hit the ball online and a specific distance, not how far you can hit it.

- In nearly all cases, the brands that make iron shafts are completely separate to the brands that make the clubheads, so it's possible to get almost any shaft that you would be trying at your custom fitting session in any second hand set of older clubheads that you would find on eBay afterwards from any of the main brands of clubheads such as Titleist or Taylormade etc.

- With all second hand golf clubs (but for second hand irons and wedges in particular), the most important part of a golf club condition wise is the clubface because the clubface is what is making contact with the ball. For irons and wedges, the less the clubs have been used the sharper the grooves will be. Sharp grooves give you the highest and most consistent backspin levels possible which is important when you want to stop the ball quickly, which most often is when you are using your wedges and short irons. Grooves on wedges and irons gradually get less sharp over time after hitting many golf balls- it is a gradual process. Sellers' photos on eBay can be deceptive so it's often hard to see what state the grooves are in unless you have close up photos of clubfaces in the right lighting to properly show up clubface wear and stone chips. More clubface wear means more worn grooves. A photo which shows all of the clubfaces together in the one photo won't allow you to properly see clubface wear because the camera is not close enough to the clubfaces.

- The top brands of clubheads release a new range of irons every two years or so with minor tweaks made. Brands will give a lot of marketing BS to try and tell you about all the improvements they have made to try and get you to buy the latest clubs but these changes I believe will be very minor and are mostly cosmetic changes, rather than actual changes in performance (which is very hard to prove without robot testing which I suspect they are either not doing or are doing but not making the results public knowledge because the new clubs are not any better than the older ones, other than the worn groove issue for wedges and irons).

- For Drivers, woods and hybrids or putters I don't believe you are at any advantage performance wise by using the latest equipment so my advice would be to go for older models to get value for money. However, clubs with adjustable hosels (drivers, woods and hybrids) first came out in circa 2010 so if you buy a driver, wood or hybrid before that time then those clubs will not have an adjustable hosel so you won't be able to quickly adjust the loft or lie angle of the club in order to help you change your ball flight ie changing the launch angle up or down and hitting draws and fades.

- The market value of second hand golf clubs is decided by a combination of the age and condition of the clubs (relative to the price they were when they were new) and it's the older but good condition iron sets that I believe are the best value for money because many people won't want them just because they are ‘old' which lowers the price of them but they will have sharp grooves so they will actually out perform newer iron sets that have been used more. However, the older the irons and wedges are the more likely it is that the clubs will be well used and in bad condition but this isn't always the case.

- If you are someone who wants a brand new iron set, you can get a much better deal if you buy a new iron set that isn't one of the latest ones.If shops have not sold all of the previous models the price will come down to shift them before the new range comes out. These older iron sets will cost you significantly less money than any of the latest irons would cost, often by hundreds of pounds but you may only be able to get the clubs with the ‘stock' shafts which may not be what you want but the clubs will certainly be better value for money than the latest new irons from any of the main brands of clubheads.

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4. DIFFERENT IRONS AVAILABLE AND THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THEM

There are three different ‘types' of golf irons available:

1. Cavity back irons
2. Bladed irons (or ‘blades')
3. Muscle back irons

Cavity back irons:

A cavity back iron is one that has a hollow section in the back of the club. This removes mass from the centre of the clubface and distributes it to the outside edges of the clubhead, which provides lots of forgiveness. ‘True' cavity back irons look quite chunky behind the ball i.e they have big clubfaces, thick toplines and will also likely have a lot of offset (offset is how far the leading edge of the clubface is to the right hand side of the hosel for a right handed golfer looking at the club in the address position). Cavity back irons will have a significant amount of offset because it makes it easier to square the clubface at impact and most amateur golfers either fade or slice the golf ball, particularly higher handicappers.

Since cavity back irons are so forgiving, you can hit the ball out of the toe or the heel of the clubface and you should find it difficult to tell where on the clubface you made contact just based on the feel or sound of the ball off the face, apart from if the ball didn't go quite as far as expected. However, if you thin the ball or hit it heavy, you should be able to tell as soon as you hit it.

All irons that are regarded as ‘game improvement irons' (which are aimed at mid to high handicappers) are cavity back irons.

Bladed irons:

Bladed irons (or ‘blades') are traditional, ‘old school' looking irons with a very thin top-down look and small sweet spot. The clubfaces of bladed irons will also be smaller than cavity back irons. A blade sounds great when you strike the ball out of the centre of the clubface but it will be very obvious when the centre of the clubface is missed because it won't feel or sound the same. Off-centre shots also result in a larger loss of distance and loss of accuracy compared to cavity back irons.

Hardly anyone actually uses true blade irons anymore because they are so unforgiving.