Sorted on the Scale Before Anything Touches Epoxy
An iron set is the one place where measurement discipline shows up shot after shot, because you have seven or eight chances a round to notice the odd club out.
Head Mass Variation Is Normal and Nobody Checks It
Iron heads arrive from the foundry with real spread. Two to four grams inside a model is ordinary; six to eight happens; eleven happens more often than anyone would like. None of that is a scandal — casting and finishing have tolerances like every other manufacturing process.
The problem is that most sets are assembled in shipped order. Head number three goes on shaft number three, and whatever variation existed goes straight into the finished set. The player then spends two seasons deciding the 6-iron is "their bad club".
Sorting is fifteen minutes of work. We weigh every head, lay them out, and assign each one to the slot where its mass lands closest to the target progression. The heavy outliers go to the short irons where a gram matters least; the light ones go long.
Ninety Minutes, Four Blocks
Audit Your Current Set
Every iron you own measured for weight, swingweight, length, loft and lie. The plot of that data is usually the most persuasive document of the whole session.
Lie Board and Divot Reading
Impact tape on the sole and a lie board underneath. Where the sole first contacts the board decides lie angle far more reliably than a static wrist-to-floor chart.
Shaft Weight Class Testing
Three weight classes tested with the same head. We are watching low point consistency and turf interaction, not peak distance from one flushed 7-iron.
Progression Plan
The swingweight and length targets for every club in the set written out as a single table, with the gram budget showing how each one will be reached.
When One Model Should Not Cover the Whole Set
Long irons and short irons ask for different things, and forcing a single head design across eight clubs is a compromise nobody has to accept any more.
A common blend runs a wider-soled, more forgiving head in the 4 through 6, then a more compact head from 7 down where control and turf feedback matter more than launch help. Done casually this produces a set with a visible seam in it — a gap in distance, a jump in feel, or both.
Done on the bench it does not, because the transition club is built to sit exactly between its neighbours in mass, length and loft. That means measuring the two candidate models before the blend point is chosen rather than after.
We build a fair number of blended sets and we will happily talk you out of one if your gapping does not need it.
| Club | Length | Target SW | Loft |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4 iron | 38.50 in | D1 | 22° |
| 5 iron | 38.00 in | D1 | 25° |
| 6 iron | 37.50 in | D1.5 | 28° |
| 7 iron | 37.00 in | D1.5 | 32° |
| 8 iron | 36.50 in | D2 | 36° |
| 9 iron | 36.00 in | D2 | 40° |
| Pitching wedge | 35.75 in | D2.5 | 45° |
Rebuilding a Set You Already Like
If your heads are sound and you like how they look at address, a rebuild is usually the better value. We pull the shafts, sort the heads by measured mass, reassign them, reshaft or reuse, and bring the whole set inside the posted tolerance band.
Typical outcome: the same eight heads you walked in with, playing evenly for the first time, at a fraction of the cost of a new set. It also gives us a complete ledger for clubs that had none.
- Heads pulled, cleaned, weighed and sorted
- Lofts and lies checked and corrected to a single spec
- Shafts reused where sound, replaced where pitted or bent
- Grips replaced with a matched, weighed set
- Full ledger card produced for every club
Bring the Whole Set, Including the Clubs You Skip
The 4-iron that lives in the garage is data. Ninety minutes on the bench, and the plot of your current set usually decides the rest of the conversation for us.