Ten Minutes of Paperwork
Conditions header, radar reference status, ball model, and a short conversation about the courses you actually play. None of it involves hitting a shot.
One Variable at a Time
Head, then shaft, then length, then weight. Never two together, which is why a thorough session takes two hours rather than forty minutes.
Paper in Your Hand
The sheet prints while you are still here, gets read through with you, and a copy stays on file under your name for five years.
Step one
Logging the Room
The first entries on your sheet are not about you. Bay temperature, station pressure, the ball model coming out of the sleeve, the radar unit's identifier and the date of its last reference check all go across the top before anything else happens.
This takes a few minutes and looks like bureaucracy. It is the single most useful thing on the page. A distance figure with no stated conditions cannot be compared to anything, which means it cannot be checked, which means it is not really evidence. Six months from now, when your five iron seems short, that header is what lets us tell you whether the club changed or the weather did.
The Monday Reference Check
Every Monday morning, before the first appointment, the radar gets pointed at a known reference and asked to agree with a figure we have been recording since the unit was commissioned. Small drift is normal in any instrument. Undocumented drift is the problem.
If the check comes back outside tolerance, the unit is corrected and the correction is noted. If it cannot be corrected, the bay does not open. That has happened three times in the studio's history, and each time the affected appointments were moved rather than run.
The Ball Question
Range balls are not used here for any recorded shot. A new sleeve of premium urethane comes out for each session and the model goes on the header. If you play a different ball, bring a sleeve of it and we will record against yours instead, which is genuinely better data.
- Header entries
- Six, before any swing
- Reference check
- Monday, before opening
- Warm-up
- Unrecorded, as long as needed
- Recorded shots
- Roughly 90 to 160
Why We Ask You Not to Range First
A player who has already hit eighty balls arrives at the bay warm, loose and unlike themselves on the first tee. We want the swing that shows up on a Saturday, not the one that appears after an hour of practice.
Warm up here instead. It is unrecorded, unhurried, and part of the booked time rather than an extra.
What Gets Thrown Away
Not every recorded shot counts. Anything you call off before impact, anything that catches the mat, and anything struck outside a reasonable window of your own strike pattern is marked and excluded before averaging.
Excluded shots stay printed on the sheet in grey. You can see exactly what was discarded and why, which is the only way that discarding is defensible.
Steps two through four
Baseline, Then One Change, Then Paper
The middle of a session is repetitive by design. Repetition is what turns a handful of shots into something with a defensible centre.
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Your own clubs, measured properly
Whatever you walked in with gets swung and recorded first. Nothing comes off the rack until there is a baseline on the page, because a change with nothing to compare against is not a finding, it is a feeling. We also gauge the clubs statically: loft, lie, length, swingweight and grip condition. Roughly one set in four turns out to be materially different from what the player believed they owned.
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Head first, and only the head
If the session involves head selection, that is the first variable and it moves alone. The shaft stays whatever it was. Comparing a new head on a new shaft against your old club tells you that the combination is different, which you already knew, and nothing about which half did the work.
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Shaft, then length, then mass
Shafts go next, in a short list narrowed by the baseline rather than by preference. Then finished length, which changes both the strike pattern and the effective lie. Then head mass and grip mass, which are the finishing adjustments and the ones most often skipped elsewhere. Each change is recorded before the next is made.
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Confirmation block
Once a specification emerges, we go back and hit a final block with it, cold, after a short break. A specification that only performs while you are still in rhythm from testing it is not a specification you can take to a golf course.
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Print, read, file
The sheet comes off the printer with you standing there. We read through it together, including the parts that are unflattering. A copy stays on file under your name so that a visit in 2030 can be compared to this one rather than starting from nothing.
The two columns
Why Your Sheet Reports Every Distance Twice
The left column is the valley: what the club did here, in this bay, at four hundred and sixty-six feet with the air behaving the way it behaves in Palm Springs. It is a measured figure and it is honest about being local.
The right column is travel: the same swing, modelled into cooler and denser air nearer sea level. It is explicitly an estimate and the sheet labels it as one. It exists because a great many of our clients play half their golf somewhere else, and a yardage card built entirely from valley readings will mislead them the moment they leave.
Neither column is the true number, because there is no such thing. There are readings taken under stated conditions, and there are estimates for other conditions, clearly marked as estimates. Anything else is a distance with no provenance.
What the Sheet Contains, Line by Line
- Conditions header with date, bay temperature and pressure
- Ball model and radar unit reference status
- Static gauge of every club you arrived with
- Per club carry centre and the spread either side of it
- Roll shown separately, never added into carry
- Spacing between consecutive clubs in the tested set
- Excluded shots, printed in grey with a reason
- Final build specification in full
- Travel column with its estimation basis stated
Two sides of A4. No logos, no scores out of ten, no recommendation to buy anything that is not already in the specification block.
After the session
What Happens if You Order, and What Happens if You Do Not
If Nothing Is Ordered
You leave with the sheet, the file copy stays here, and that is genuinely the end of it. No follow-up call, no discount offer three weeks later, no message asking whether you have thought any more about the shaft.
A meaningful share of sessions end this way, most often because the measured answer was that the existing clubs are fine and a bench adjustment will close the gap. That outcome is not a failure and it is not treated as one.
If Something Is Ordered
Components are ordered against the written specification, not against memory. When they arrive, the club is built at the bench here, then measured again: length, lie, loft, swingweight, total mass and balance point, all checked against the sheet it came from.
Anything outside tolerance gets rebuilt rather than shipped. When you collect it you get a build record showing the as-built figures next to the as-specified ones. Lead times run two to three weeks in season and rather less in summer.
6
Header fields before any swing
1
Variable changed at a time
2
Columns on every distance
5
Years the file copy is kept
Plain answers
Three Things Players Ask Halfway Through
Asked most
Why is the number lower than the one I got elsewhere?
Usually because you are looking at carry rather than a total that included modelled roll, and occasionally because the other reading was taken with a range ball on a warmer afternoon. Neither reading is wrong. They were taken under different conditions and only one of them wrote those conditions down.
Asked often
Can we just try the club I read about?
Yes, and we will put it in the rotation properly rather than as a favour. It gets the same block, the same exclusions and the same line on the sheet as everything else. If it wins, it wins on the page. Curiosity is a perfectly good reason to test something.
Asked rarely, worth asking
More questions we get
What if I swing badly on the day?
Then the sheet says so, and the spread column will be wider than usual. A bad day does not ruin a session, but it does change what the session can conclude. If the spread is wide enough that a specification cannot be defended, we say that plainly and you come back at no charge.
Book the time, not the outcome
The fee covers the session and the sheet. What you do with the specification afterwards is entirely yours, including nothing.