I’ve always been a high ball, high spin player. For a while now, I’ve been looking for shafts to help bring my ball flight down and reduce spin. After hitting a set of Adrian Wadey’s Bridgestone J33′s with Project X’s that felt like telephone poles, I was sold. The ball flight was so much more consistent and flat than my Titleist 681′s with S300 shafts. The only problem was that Adrian had no idea what flex his shafts were and there was no frequency machine around to test them. I ordered some 6.5′s and decided to give them a try.

After getting back home from the Utah Open qualifier, I put in an old set of irons, some TourStage Z101′s with Tour Concept X100 shafts. These were DRAMATICALLY better than the S300′s, so I kept them in and tested them against a 7 iron 681 with the Project X shaft I installed in it as a test. The test club came to a D3 swing weight and frequencied at 7.5 on the Rifle scale, or a soft X-flex. I took both seven irons out and after a warm up, was hitting my Z101 about 172 yards to a practice green at our course. I then pulled out the Project X and was pretty bummed with what happened next.

I hit the first shot very solid and it actually ballooned on me, starting on a nice lower trajectory and then climbing high and falling out of the sky 10 yards short of where I was just hitting the TC shaft. I just considered it a fluke and hit some more. Each shot flew higher and shorter with MORE spin than the Tour Concept X100. The TC shaft frequencied slightly stiffer at about 8.2, or just over half a flex stiffer, and that likely had some influence, but overall, I was dissappointed with this first go around. I’ll have to keep digging to see if I can the specs on Adrian’s clubs. Note, the loft angle of each club was identical at 31*.