Grafalloy Prolaunch SuperCharged Golf Shaft Review

Grafalloy Prolaunch Supercharged Drive Shafts

By Russ Ryden, Fit2Score, A Dallas Fort Worth Club Fitter & Club Maker
The Golf Center at the Highlands, Carrollton Texas

The Grafalloy Prolaunch Blue and Red Supercharged drive shafts are 2015 additions to the ProLaunch product line. They are $60 shafts with radial quality of 98.3% with a standard deviation of 0.6%. If you have not been reading this site and looking the radial quality numbers I will translate this for you, one word, impressive. Shaft to shaft consistency of the review sample profiles was equally impressive. I did not think a $60 shaft would get my attention. I was wrong.

If the $300 to $500 high end works of shaft art technology are not in your budget, try the Grafalloy Prolaunch Supercharged in your driver. You are going to give up some hoop stiffness and might experience some ovalizing. If that is a problem you can always get a similar design in the Project X LZ for around $350. The SuperCharged Prolaunch has a similar design to the handcrafted Project X LZ shaft, an active midsection. Does this design work for you? If you are not close to a fitter that can let you test the Project X LZ you can try a low cost test on your own with the ProLaunch Supercharged shafts.

The Blue is a higher launch design, the Red a lower launch. To my eyes they are much the same profile. The Red is heavier and stiffer. The bend point is higher. Those two properties are going to lower launch. This is not really complicated stuff to understand. Stiffer is lower for any particular golfer. Find the stiffness you feel you can load. Then, going a little softer or stiffer will move the launch up or down.

Look at the balance in this chart. These shaft are counterweighted to restore club balance when using the current generation of heavy driver heads. This is not seen at this price point.

This profile, a softer active midsection is gaining traction with the shaft companies. With this set of profiles, this particular pattern got my attention. Soft midsections are among the most popular shafts in the business. Exaggerated soft is a design I am beginning to see from a lot of shaft companies. it looks like one needs to go in my bag.

Grafalloy ProLaunch Golf Shaft Review

Grafalloy ProLaunch Driver Shafts

By Russ Ryden, Fit2Score, A Dallas Fort Worth Club Fitter & Club Maker
The Golf Center at the Highlands, Carrollton Texas

The Grafalloy Prolaunch is not a new design, it has been with us for a long time. It got a new paint job this year. As companies get better at making shafts, the quality and consistency of products gets better. What I saw in measuring a the $40 ProLaunch Blue and Red was beyond what I expected. Radial consistency was 98.9% with a 0.8% standard deviation. These shafts are round and will get no benefit from alignment. And the bend profiles were also consistent. There were no outliers in the 10 shafts I measured. That is not always the case, and it is rarely the case with a $40 shaft. I am impressed.

Beginning with this review I am introducing a new method for rating shaft stiffness. The method comes from inside one of the major club companies that has an EI measuring instrument. They use area under the EI curve to compare shaft to shaft stiffness. Frequency measured at the butt of a shaft works on shafts with the same bend profiles. When shafts have different bend profiles butt frequency does not give an accurate measurement. Have you ever heard or said, ‘this shaft plays softer (or harder) than it measures. Did it ever occur to you that you were basically saying the measurement system you were using does not work?

Using area under the EI curve takes into account every point of the shaft. The correlation with deflection measurements is incredibly high. It appears that we have stumbled on a shaft stiffness rating system that actually works.

Grafalloy rates the launch of the Blue as higher than the Red. Look at the chart above and you will see that with the same stiffness rating the Red deflects less than the Blue. The launch rating given by Grafalloy is validated. The more expensive, $80 Grafalloy Blue is also rated low launch and is validated by the deflection numbers. It has a stiffer tip, pushing the kick point up the shaft. Radial quality of the Grafalloy Blue, 99.6% with a standard deviation of 0.5%. Translation, great quality and consistency and a notification to the shaft business that quality is possible in affordable products.

Fuikura SIX Driver Shaft Review

Fujikura SIX DRIVER SHAFTS

By Russ Ryden, Fit2Score, A Dallas Fort Worth Club Fitter & Club Maker
The Golf Center at the Highlands, Carrollton Texas

The Fujikura SIX is an update and new release of a past Fujikura design. I did not know the original shaft so I cannot comment on the similarity. This short video will give you the history of the design.

As mentioned in the video, it is a classic design. A slightly soft mid in relation to tip and butt. As you noticed in the video, the term soft causes most in the shaft business to flinch. Perhaps some day I will learn to say stiff tip stiff butt rather than soft mid. I start most fittings with a soft mid shaft, it fits most players so it is no wonder this shaft was once popular on tour.

The technical discussion and measurements are available only to registered readers

Fujikura Speeder Tour Spec Golf Shaft Review

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Fujikura Speeder Evolution Tour SpecDriver Shaft

Russ Ryden, Golf Digest America’s 100 Best Clubfitter
Fit2Score, Dallas Fort Worth, Texas

Fujikura offers a Tour Spec version of most model. The Speeder Evolution Tour Spec model is different enough from the Speeder 757 that it deserved a separate review. This shaft is one of the standard option in the 2015 TaylorMade R15 driver. It is manufactured by Sino in China unlike the Speeder which is made in Japan.

The technical discussion and measurements are available only to registered readers

However it is not that easy to forecast how a shaft will launch in your hands. In this illustration the softest of the Speeder Evolution Tour Spec, the 661S to the 757X are subjected to progressively heavier loads. You can see how much more the 661S bends than the 757X. And, how the intersection of the two curves moves under load. The launch of a shaft is a function of how you load it.

The objective of the professional fitter is to find that combination of shaft profile, weight and stiffness that creates the tightest impact pattern, centered on the club face. Then to the degree possible, fine tune your launch with close variations of profile, weight and flex. Doing so is enhanced by how much your fitter understands the golf shafts he is using.

Fujikura Speeder Evolution Golf Shaft Review

Fujikura Speeder Evolution Driver Shaft

Russ Ryden, Golf Digest America’s 100 Best Clubfitter
Fit2Score, Dallas Fort Worth, Texas

The Fujikura Speeder 757 was my introduction to premium driver shafts many years ago. The Speeder brand name disappeared for many years. It was brought back a few years ago as the Motore Speeder, a complex matrix of 26 shafts, featuring 3 launch designs, each in an array of weight and flex. In late 2013 the Speeder brand was reintroduced with 8 shafts, numbered like the original Speeder. The Fujikura Speeder Evolution came to the golfing public in 2015. It is designed to handle the heavier driver heads we are now seeing. As you can see in this illustration, the tip is stiffer and there is a tip-mid stiffness adjustment as part of the design update.

Like all of the Speeder models from Fujikura the profiles are consistent throughout the model. As the weight increases so does the stiffness. The Speeder 474 R2 weighs 48 grams uncut. The weights and stiffness ascend from a 4″ deflection yielding 5.8 lbs for the 474R2, and 8.6 lbs for the 79 gram 757X. The raw shafts are 47″ long, not the typical 46″.

Lets take a look at the profiles, they vary by model:

The technical discussion and measurements are available only to registered readers

The Speeder Evolution is a classical design, mid soft in relation to a stiffer butt and tip.This design is a good fit for the majority of golfers. We can see the research done on the 3D ENSO system shaping the butt to create softer handles.

An interesting aspect of these shafts stood out during hoop stiffness testing. A significant ‘bump’ of hoop stiffness in the high midsection of the shaft. If you look at the EI curves you will see this is where the shaft is quickly descending in stiffness. At that point, an ultra high modulus hoop ply was added to preserve shaft stability.

Hoop stiffness is a function of wall thickness. near the tip, where the wall of the shaft are thick, the hoop stiffness is high. This graphic shows hoop deflection measurements. The less deflection, the stiffer that area of the shaft is. This is hoop stiffness, not bend stiffness. Hoop stiffness relates to the shaft ovalizing. The lower the number, the less oval deformation I measured. So, the dips you see are increases in hoop stiffness. The design objective in the Fujikura Speeder Evolution is to create shaft stability, and hence feel, in the section of the shaft where to majority of the load related bending occurs. What you see is the result of engineered wall thickness and high density pitch fiber pregreg in the hoop orientation, stabilizing the mid/butt region of the shaft.

An interesting discussion on another golf forum contained this comment, “This is the answer to all the “profile is profile” theorists – whose claim is that if I match bend pattern, weight, balance point and frequency then my $12 shaft is the same as your $175 shaft. Torque progression and distribution aren’t as handy to quantify but are essential elements in any high-performance design, and aren’t to be had for peanuts.” We see in the Speeder Evolution design is what this writer was talking about. A highly evolved design using the latest high density fibers, fiber orientation and wall thickness control to create a performance enhancing golf shaft.

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