BMT – No Longer Just For Drivers….

The basics of this system are to measure a player’s swing speed, overall swing tempo (time from start to finish of swing) and release point – where he/she releases his/her wrist cock. From these data, the system develops an estimated butt-mid-tip flex appropriate for the measured parameters. Then – using a data base of hundreds of shafts where measurements of shaft butt, mid, and tip stiffness have been made – it is possible to identify a shaft or shafts that are good fits for the way players swing their drivers.

The premise of using this fitting system is that it leads to using a shaft that best fits the player’s swing characteristics, and so will significantly reduce the dispersion of driver results. Some prominent fitters have had 100% success rates using this system.

Over the past year I have been learning more of how other fitters have been applying this system to also fit fairway wood shafts. The way most have done this is to measure 3 wood swing speed, tempo, and release and use the same shaft BMT data – adding 10 grams of shaft weight to the shaft weight used for the driver – to find a good shaft for a player’s 3 wood.

There are a lot of companies now that are developing fairway wood shafts that are meant to be put into 3 woods without any tipping. ACCRA shafts are a great example of this approach, and a number of PGA tour players are using ACCRA shafts with great results. The value of doing this is to promote a higher launch for 3 woods – or simply for your longest fairway wood.

I tested this on my fairway woods recently. A good BMT shaft fit for my fairway woods is an SK Fiber TT 80 A flex shaft. So I put this shaft into my Wishon 949 MC 3 wood without any tipping, and built my 5, 7, and 9 fairway woods with the same shaft but with enough tipping so the butt flex of all of the clubs would be the same. So far I have been very pleased with the performance results of these reshafted woods, and believe this is a great approach for fairway wood shaft fitting.

Tony