Project X Loading Zone Iron Shafts

Project X LZ Iron Shaft Review

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

True Temper introduced the term “Loading Zone” with the Project X Loading Zone driver shaft a few years ago. I was skeptical at first, having seen other shafts with severe approaches to mid shaft stiffness that did not work for many of my clients. I put a Project X Loading Zone shaft in my own driver and it stayed there for several months. It comes back when I finish play testing a new design. It loads effortlessly and gives my unfixable negative angle of attack the launch I need to buy some distance. I was anxious to see how this approach would be implemented in an iron shaft.

The Project X Loading Zone irons shaft has a rapid loss of stiffness in the mid zone of the shaft. It then runs out in a long stable tip. We have seen some very successful implementations of this design over the last few years. Each with its own particular flavor. But overall in my fitting experience a very playable shaft for a wide range of golfers. This design is easy to load, creates a moderately higher flight but remains workable for the highly skilled golfer. I have seen this design add distance without adding dispersion. As of this writing, the Project X LZ has won 3 PGA events and is being played by close to 20 players between the PGA and Web tours.

The technical discussion and measurements are available only to registered readers

Our player/coach/fitter partner has put these into his gamers for several weeks now. He replaced his Dynamic Gold Tour X100’s with the Project X LZ 6.5. His driver swing speed averages 117. He reports that he loves the feel of the shaft through impact. He gets a little lower flight and a lot more control. His ability to work the ball is improved. His dispersion is tighter. He reports he can trust the shaft to deliver the head consistently to shape his ball flight.

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Russ

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Dynamic Gold AMT – Tour Issue – Golf Shaft Review

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Dynamic Gold AMT Iron Shafts

By Russ Ryden and Mark Maness

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

AMT stands for Ascending Mass Technology. It is not a new concept. Ping has had ascending weight shafts for many years. Nippon 999’s were ascending. Aerotech Players Spec were ascending. If you are not a club maker you probably have not been exposed to the concept. Briefly, there are primarily two kinds of shafts; constant weight tapers and parallel’s. Constant weight tapers are made to length in the factory and the shafts in the set are all the same weight even though they are different lengths. Parallels are made to one length in the factory. The club maker cuts them to the length needed for the club he is building. As they are cut shorter they weigh less. The shafts in a set are lighter in the short irons than in the long irons. I wrote an article about this some years ago in the technical stuff section of this site; Constant Weight vs Parallel Iron Shafts.

Iron heads get heavier as the the numbers get higher. The 4 iron head is heavier than the 3 iron, the 5 iron is heavier than the 4 iron and so on down to the gap wedge. In sets made of parallel shafts, the shafts get lighter while the head gets heavier. In sets made from constant weight shafts, the shafts are the same weight while the heads get heavier. In ASCENDING WEIGHT sets, the shafts get heavier as the heads get heavier. This has always been an attraction the club builders that create MOI, Moment of Inertia, matched sets.

The technical discussion, measurements and testing results are available only to registered readers

This is a great step forward in iron shaft technology. Keep it coming, True Temper, the club building community has waited a long time for a set of iron shafts like this!

Project X HZDRUS Yellow Golf Shaft Review

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Project X HZRDUS Yellow Driver Shaft

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

The Project X HZRDUS Yellow is the third driver shaft in the Hand Crafted family from True Temper. It has a notably soft midsection. This is much like the first in the series, the Project X Loading Zone reviewed earlier. The bend profile is much like the profiles of the 70 gram versions of the Project X Loading Zone model. The soft zones of those shafts moved with weight and flex. I have fit a number of players into the 50 and 60 gram versions of the Loading Zone. Therefore, another shaft with that design grabbed my attention.

I had a chance just recently to test it during a fitting with a single digit handicap player that showed up with a 6 year old driver and a 103 mph golf swing. Working with the Yellow HZRDUS and a TaylorMade M1 we added 2 mph to his swing speed, 3 mph to his ball speed, dropped his spin 800 rpm all of which added 17 yards to his drives. His playing buddies are in for a surprise.

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Russ

Project X HZRDUS Black Driver Shaft Review

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Project X HZRDUS Black Driver Shaft

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

The Project X brand is a flagship in the golf shaft business. The brand started as an unstepped steel shaft and has morphed into carbon fiber driver and hybrid shafts. This shaft, like the Project X loading zone that came before it is hand made in the US under tight quality control processes.

The product information from True Temper tells us the shaft has a firmer midsection than the Loading Zone model. And indeed it does, lets look at the numbers:

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Russ

Project X Loading Zone Golf Shaft Review

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Project X Loading Zone Driver Shafts

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

The Project X LZ, or loading zone shaft features a linear soft zone in the middle of the shaft which is visibly reinforced with bias wraps to maintain torsional stability. This 2014 composite driver shaft from True Temper, released under the Project X brand, is made in limited numbers in the USA facility in San Diego California. I am told only 60 or 70 can be made in any given day with current staffing.

This is an interesting option now being offered by a few companies. The general golfing public has access to the shafts that are made in the tour department for the tour players. Most graphite shafts are hand rolled. As such, the care taken by the person putting the shaft together is reflected in the quality and consistency of the finished shaft. Almost every company has some highly skilled wrappers that make their prototypes. And very often, when these people are not making protos, they are making the shafts that go to the professional tour vans. These shafts are not necessarily better than the shafts made in the volume production shops, but they are free of the shaft to shaft inconsistencies found in the factory produced product. And I have seen some inconsistencies that are hard to believe from the high volume, low cost foundries, but that is another story.

The concept of the Load Zone was to create a soft midsection in the shaft. Mid soft shafts are among the most popular shaft in my fitting experience. No shaft company likes to hear a section of their shafts being discussed as soft. If you make the tip stiff and the butt stiff, the mid is soft in relation to those other two zones. In the Project X Loading Zone shaft, the soft mid section is reinforced by a material called flex lock. That is graphite fiber oriented on an angle from the length of the shaft, commonly refereed to as bias or hoop plies. This stabilizes the torque in this zone. A full discussion of the design is shown in the videoed discussion I had with Don Brown, the True Temper graphite shaft product development manager.

The technical discussion and measurements are available only to registered readers

This is an interview shot at the 2015 PGA merchandise show in Orlando. Don Brown is the Graphite Shaft Product Development Manger for True Temper Sports. The discussion of the Loading Zone Shafts gets technical. Many readers of this site tell me they do not understand some of the graphics and discussions in my reviews. What you see in this video is a discussion using the terms you see on this shaft review site. Enjoy!

The technical discussion and measurements are available only to registered readers

Whenever someone asks me what is the best shaft, the answer is always the same, ‘the one that fits your swing.’ This one fits the swing change I am working on. The other shaft fit the swing I had. So I will leave you with this thought. There is a synergy between your gear and your swing. If your swing is grooved on a particular shaft loading pattern, that shaft may not best fit a swing change you are trying to make. In fact, it may impede you from being successful with a new motion pattern.