The Truth About Adjustable Hosel Drivers
Tom Wishon has written a must-read report on the truth about adjustable hosel drivers.
In mid February, I and other club fitters had some correspondence with Tom Wishon from Tom Wishon Golf. Tom Wishon Golf is a recognized industry leader in research into golf club design, club performance, and custom club fitting.
In one of his notes to me, he said that “… the situation with the adjustable hosel pieces is stacking up as THE number one biggest area of conflicting information that I have ever seen.” Tom mentioned at that time that he would get a number of the major OEM adjustable hosel driver heads and actually measure specs for loft, face angle, and lie angle for different settings with these heads.
Well he completed that study about a week ago, and has published the results he obtained – here is the link to his report:
Tom Wishon Technical Report on Adjustable Hosel Drivers
The first part of the report provides details how how he made precision measurements on loft, face angle, and lie angle. It then discusses the basics of how adjustable hosel designs work.
The most important part of the report is the measurement results he presented. He made detailed measurements for four of the major OEM drivers being sold today. I hope many of you can take the time to read this part of the report and his conclusions. Here are some of the highlights that I think should be most important to you:
- A very large majority of the measured Face Angles for the drivers measured are Very Open – often more than 3 degrees and even in the range of 8 degrees open! This is bad news for golfers who want help from their driver to reduce the amount that they slice the ball. Golfers who slice need Closed Face drivers, not Open Face drivers.
- Many of the measured driver lofts are more – often a lot more – than 1 degree different than the stated lofts for the OEM driver settings. If you think you are hitting a 10.5 degree loft driver, you may in fact be hitting one that has as much as 12.5 or more degrees of loft. If you balloon your drives with one of these drivers, this could be the cause.
- Tom’s results confirmed his expectations from the start (he in fact had developed an adjustable hosel driver design in 1995) – “… you simply cannot change the loft of a woodhead through a change in the angle of the shaft using such an adjustable hosel device.”
- The design of the TaylorMade adjustable driver is actually different than the others – it has an adjustable sole protrusion piece on the sole that can in fact allow you to change loft and face angle at the same time. For this driver there are 84 different settings that you can make for loft, face angle, and lie angle with this driver. It is the one adjustable driver that can possibly be set up, in my opinion, to provide loft and face angle settings that can help a driver fitting. However, you had better work with someone who Really understands what the settings will produce.
Tom’s report illustrates in detail the truth about Adjustable Hosel Driver Designs – in my view, at this time, buyer beware if you want a high-quality fitting with one of these designs! At a minimum – know for SURE what the Loft and Face Angle settings are for the driver that you think you are able to hit well.
Questions for the Custom Club Fitter? – If you have any questions for me please provide them in the Comments section and I will respond to them as soon as I can. Thanks.
The Fit Is IT!!
Tony
