Introducing Moonlander, designated for the walking purist who favors a simpler, cleaner design with only enough pockets for essentials. It is light, only 4 ½ lbs., and has six pockets.
New colorways and lively patterns are offered in this long-popular carry bag. It boasts a stacked pocket configuration for easier access and a large ball pocket among nine altogether. A four-way top is reconfigured to optimize organization and handling.
The new-and-improved, highly organized Traverse is ready to roll, offering a re-designed 14-way top that safeguards clubs, including the putter, which gets its own well.
Bringing you insights from the PING Proving Grounds, where our talented team of engineers, researchers, fitting experts and data scientists design and develop the newest product and fitting technologies to help you play better. Using the most advanced tools available, we’ll explain and explore the science behind golf-equipment performance. We’ll separate fact from fiction with the goal of helping you make informed decisions when choosing the PING equipment best suited for maximizing your performance.
The terms “stepping” and “tipping” may be as unfamiliar to most golfers as the terms “chiffonade” and “julienne” to the average home cook. However, all these terms are part of the daily vocabulary of proficient professionals in their respective trades. They also all happen to be terms for different cutting methods. This article could have been titled “There’s more than one way to slice a golf shaft.” But if you’re like most golfers, you’ve seen enough slices. The world’s best chefs discuss certain techniques and tools of refinement that distinguish their food from the rest. This post sets out to explain a few tools of refinement a club builder can use to match a shaft’s stiffness to a player’s needs: Tipping and Stepping.
Before getting into the weeds, let’s step back and talk about shaft “stiffness” or “flex." We care about how a shaft flexes, bends, or twists during the swing for a few reasons. First, the stiffness of a shaft affects swing feel and can help (or hurt) timing and consistency. Second, the stiffness of a shaft affects how the head is delivered to the ball. For example, a very flexible shaft-tip section can deliver the head to the ball with additional loft. For these and other reasons, players will benefit from finding the appropriate shaft stiffness profile.
So how should a golfer go about finding the right shaft? When perusing shaft offerings in shops or catalogs, it doesn’t take long to discover just how many different shaft brands, models and flexes exist. It’s a market ripe with options designed to offer something for every golfer. Unfortunately, that market also lacks standardization for any metrics that define shaft stiffness. It’s kind of like trying to count calories on cereal boxes, except none of the products list calories and instead each list their own indecipherable units. Luckily, PING measures shafts and shares apples-to-apples stiffness data with our accounts via the ShaftApp. By asking about preferences and observing a player’s speed, swing, and trajectory, a qualified PING fitter can help determine a target flex range and stiffness profile.
Shaft-flex offerings are discretized and often identified (in order of increasing stiffness) as: Soft Regular (SR), Regular (R), Stiff (S), and Extra Stiff (X). The frequency of a shaft is often used to determine the shaft flex category. Simply stated, frequency is the shaft tip’s rate of oscillation when the grip end is fixed and the tip end is deflected and released using a known weight on the tip of the shaft. Think of a bored child playing with a spring door stop… that’s basically the same method. Neighboring shaft-flex categories can be separated in frequency by as few as 8 cycles per minute (CPM) and as many as 20 or more. As an example, a company may define flexes as follows (in CPM): SR = 230, R = 245, S = 260, X = 275. In an ideal scenario, a golfer will fit into a shaft that has perfect feel and trajectory for them. Perfect may be hard to find, but plenty of golfers thrive playing something that’s close enough. That said, if there’s room for a shaft to feel or fly just a little bit better, it could be a good time to consider some extra refinement. For example, a fitter may determine that 265 is an ideal frequency target, so not quite an S or an X in the example. Enter stepping and tipping.
If you’re not an engineer and this post started diving into the “second moment of area” or the physics of beam deflection, I would fully expect (and even accept) that you’d be ready to close this article right now. Fortunately, there are other ways to discuss stepping and tipping. In the simplest terms, the thickness or diameter of a shaft is a main factor of stiffness. All else equal, a somewhat larger shaft will be significantly stiffer. In fact, the radius of a cylindrical beam is multiplied to the 4th power in the equation for stiffness! That means a shaft with a 2" radius would be 16 times stiffer than a shaft with a 1" radius (24 = 16, 14 = 1).
In golf-shaft terms, one way to build the same shaft in a club but with more stiffness is to simply use the larger portion of the shaft. Since shafts tend to taper from the grip to the tip… and since stiffness tends to reduce from the grip to the tip… removing some of the more flexible tip end (“tipping” or “tip trimming”) before installing the shaft will yield a larger, stiffer shaft. Most metal-wood shafts are made with a parallel tip of a certain length (often 3 inches) that enables tip trimming while still providing the right tip size to bond into the head.
Much like tipping, stepping essentially provides a shaft with a different diameter to change stiffness slightly. Iron shafts are often designed with a particular club in mind.
Unique shafts are provided for each club, often from a 2-iron to a wedge. Typical steel shafts are the same weight (known as constant weight) regardless of the club for which they are designed. Constant weight usually yields stiffer shafts as they get shorter since more material is fit into a shorter club through thicker walls (most shafts are hollow, so the internal diameter gets smaller on shorter shafts).
Diameter profiles (or step patterns in steel shafts) are the other factor that can create a stiffness progression through a set of shafts. Many iron shafts have the same step pattern throughout the set to provide consistent performance and feel. However, that step pattern tends to move closer to the tip of the shaft as they get shorter. Much like tipping in a driver shaft, shorter iron shafts typically have less length of the smallest diameter portion, which makes them slightly stiffer.
These features yield a slight progression in stiffness that can help produce a gradually lower, more controlled trajectory as the shafts get shorter. By building a 7-iron with an 8-iron shaft, a club builder is “hard-stepping” once by providing a slightly stiffer, heavier shaft than would have been used in the club. In the same way, “soft-stepping” can be achieved by putting a 6-iron shaft in a 7-iron head. Each club offset between the shaft and head establishes how many times the shafts have been stepped. For example, a 4-PW set built with 2-8 shafts would be considered soft-stepped twice.
Some shafts have steeper stiffness progressions (e.g. ascending weight designs like AWT 2.0) or no progression at all (e.g. the same shaft used in every club), so the effect of stepping does vary. One step often shifts a set of shafts by about a quarter of a flex, so it is not typically done in either direction (hard or soft) more than twice.
By now, you may have a better understanding when using the words tip and step when talking about club specs. The key takeaway is that 1" of tip trimming changes the metal wood shaft stiffness by 1/3 of a flex and one step changes an iron shaft by roughly a 1/4 flex. So the next time you’re thinking about new clubs, or feel you may be in between flexes and looking for alternatives, contact your local PING Authorized Fitters to find out if tipping or stepping are options that will benefit your game.
David has worked in PING’s R&D team since 2013, including his current role as Senior Design Engineer, where his primary focus is design and development of shafts and grips. He is a named inventor on 20 patents and has played an integral role in developing the full suite of PING proprietary shafts, from putters to drivers, including the AWT 2.0, ALTA, Tour, ULT, and Prodi G series. David earned his Bachelor’s degree in Engineering Physics and a Master’s degree in Engineering and Technology Management from the Colorado School of Mines. Prior to joining PING, David worked as a Product Design Engineer at a major shaft manufacturer.