Flexible Drive Shaft

Golf Club Fitting Leads to Huge Gains

The role of technology in golf is different than its role in most other sports. In most other sports, the hottest, newest, most boundary-pushing tech is only available to competitors at the very highest level. And those supremely skilled athletes are the only ones who can really take advantage of that technology.

In golf, it’s the opposite. The top pros don’t necessarily play the most technologically advance equipment. After all, someone like Phil Mickelson could beat me in a match playing with a 2×4 rather than a real club. But for a mid to high handicapper, the way that the right equipment can change your game is mind-blowing.

Take my driver. (Please!)

For months, I’ve struggled to get the distance and control that I would like off the tee. Even though I have a pretty good swing speed, I was only hitting the ball just a little bit over 200 yards on my typical drive, and everything was going right. Way, way right.

So I headed to Cool Clubs , a club fitting facility founded by industry legend Mark Timms, which has locations in seven sites around the US. When I got there, my fitters Kevin Bresnahan and Justin Nelson got me set up in front of their Trackman launch monitor, which uses radar to calculate how far the shots you’re hitting into a net would fly out on the course.

I warmed up, and then hit my driver. The numbers? Average distance 211 yards, and up to 35 yards off line. Ouch.

Kevin and Justin quickly diagnosed the issue. The stock shaft on my TaylorMade R11 was far too flexible for my swing. That not only lead to hitting the ball shorter, but it lead to my control problems as well.

“With a shaft like that, the clubhead doesn’t catch up with your swing,” Justin told me. What he meant was that at impact, the shaft hadn’t straightened out yet, so that the clubface was behind the shaft, and open to my swing. That’s a recipe for all my misses to the right.

We swapped in a new, stiffer shaft . I hit the first couple of balls, and the numbers came up. Kevin and Justin started grinning.

Distance: 246 yards. Side to side miss? 13 yards.

Swapping one piece of graphite for another got me 34 yards of distance, and increased my accuracy almost 200 percent. Slapping down the credit card to buy the new shaft was one of the easiest decisions of my life.

The guys at Cool Clubs told me that such gains, while dramatic, are pretty common for them when they deal with amateur golfers like me. “For a guy who’s struggling with the game, he’s the person we can help most,” said Kevin.

Highly Adaptable Magnetic Tape Encoders Mount Directly to Large Shafts

Southington, Conn. — August 11, 2011… For speed and position monitoring on large diameter shafts, Baumer introduces their HDMag line of high-precision, bearing-less and contact-free magnetic tape encoders. Replacing expensive and complicated specialized solutions that require belts, gears, couplings and linkages, the HDMag series  of encoders is easy to install and will direct mount onto almost any large-shaft torque motor or generator.  

Using Baumer’s patent-pending HDMag MSGP sensor technology, the series consists of a magnetic encoder attached using flexible magnetic tape. The customized tape can be easily buckled onto the drive or generator shaft, just like a belt. With the help of the welded fastener, the tape is tightened on the shaft and can be quickly exchanged when required. The narrow read-head incorporates an integrated dual sensor head that is mounted to a frame over the flexible tape. This takes up minimal space on the shaft and operates without interruption over the fastening gap in the tape ends, and has no effect on the encoder output signal.

To ensure uninterrupted sensing across the fastening gap, the flexible magnetic tape encoder features an integrated dual sensor head and a signal processing unit (patent pending). The large permissible tolerances on axial displacement (+/- 5 mm) and air gap (up to 3 mm) ease alignment of the sensor head and also ensure  reliable detection unaffected by mechanical backlash and vibrations. The fully encapsulated electronics integrated in the sensor head are optimally protected against soiling, shocks and vibrations. The integrated FPGA-based signal processing allows for very high angular resolutions, better than 0.003° respectively more than 100,000 ppr, and will remain unaffected by thermal shaft expansion.

The Baumer Group is a leading international manufacturer of sensors and system solutions for factory and process automation. In 2011 the innovative family-owned company employs about 2,500 people worldwide in 36 locations and 18 countries. The long lasting success is built on high customer focus as well as the innovative and diversified product range of the product segments Sensor Solutions, Motion Control, Vision Technologies, Process Instrumentation, and Gluing Systems. For further information please refer to www.baumer.com.

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