Almost everything here started as a question somebody asked while standing over a ten-footer in the lab. Written up afterwards, in the same plain language we would use in the bay.
The balance point of a putter head should be derived from how much your face actually rotates during the stroke. Choosing it by how the club looks on the rack is why people own four putters.
Read the entryA putter sitting two degrees off the ground changes where the face is aiming before you have moved a muscle. Here is roughly how much, and why nobody measures it.
Read the entryStraight-back-straight-through is an accurate description of a three-foot putt and a misleading description of everything longer. What the overhead trace actually shows.
Read the entryPlumber's neck, slant, flow, double bend, centre shafted. Five shapes that change balance, offset and where the shaft appears at address, all at once.
Read the entryWhy two players with identical putters can produce completely different skid distances, and why static loft cannot be chosen from a chart.
Read the entryPistol, flat front, oversize round, counterweighted. Grip geometry alters hand pressure, and hand pressure alters face rotation more than most players believe.
Read the entryWe fit every club in the bag, and the driver session is still the most frequently booked thing we do. But putting is where the gap between what players believe and what the measurements show is widest, and it is where a well-chosen change produces a difference you can see on the first green rather than after a month of adjustment.
It is also the club that receives the least fitting attention relative to how often it is used. Roughly forty per cent of the strokes in a round are played with it. A great many golfers have never had its lie angle checked, and a fair number are playing a length that was chosen by a manufacturing convention rather than by anything about them.
So this is where the writing goes. Nothing here requires equipment to act on — most of it is simply about knowing which number to ask about.
Everything above describes what we look for. Finding out what your own numbers are takes two hours in the roll lane.