House of Forged Shafts
Long Drive Shafts for the Common Golfer
The REMAX long drive competition each year brings out the biggest baddest long drivers in the world. It is an impressive display of power and accuracy with the big stick. In the last couple years a new company has taken the circuit by storm; House of Forged Shafts. (HOF) Many of us watch such a competition and only dream of hitting it that far, now we have the opportunity to use similar shafts made by HOF but designed for those of us with snail paced swing speeds in comparison to the long drivers.
I demoed the Patriot shaft and the Mike Dobbyn Gamer shaft. I also have the Tour duty, but didn’t have a 3 wood to try it in yet. I will add that part to my review later once I have a 3 wood to try it in. With the Patriot and the Gamer I installed I-mix tips to try in my two I-Mix heads; FT-i LCG and FT-5, both are 9.5 degrees loft and have a neutral face angle. I felt confident installing these shafts with their CPMs and weight marked at the butt end of each shaft.
The first thing that struck my eye is the great white coloring of these shafts. I absolutely love the matte feeling of the white paint, and the simple logos either in red and blue on the Patriot or the black, silver and gold on the Gamer.
HOF currently uses Matrix to design and manufacture their shafts in the USA. This in my opinion is an excellent choice, since Matrix products are some of the best on the market. HOF products are of equal quality and performance. They are exclusive bend profiles and designs for House of Forged, so you can be confident that they are not just painted over Apache shafts or X-cons, they are HOF shafts.
The Patriot shaft will fit the largest market of golfers. It offers a bend profile that is needed by a large number of golfers; high/mid launch with relatively low spin. I enjoyed the smooth release of this shaft. This shaft came in at that nice driver weight of 64g. The feeling of flex from the butt down rather than the tip up is unique to Matrix and reproduced in the HOF Patriot Shaft. This is often referred to as the “hinge” effect. The Patriot has great feel partnered with decent dispersion. I was able to find the fairway all day long with the Patriot.
The Mike Dobbyn Gamer shaft, became my gamer with a tad more weight, (81g) a slightly different bend profile(mid launch), and virtually perfect spin numbers. I had the chance to get this on a launch monitor and found launch angle, spin numbers, and speed were the best combo I had ever seen. On the course I found those numbers were even better than on the launch monitor. I hit some of the biggest drives of my life. I am a pretty consistent driver around 260-265yards off the tee, but with the Mike Dobbyn Gamer in play, I averaged 275 yards off the tee and hit one of the longest drives of my life at 332 yards. (GPS verified). I was happy that it was not only long, but tight. I couldn’t quite hit all my drives into a hula-hoop, but a 10x10 box I could find with 8 out of 10 drives.
The only note I have is just to be a little careful on install. As I was prepping the tip for install, the white paint kind of chipped off rather than sanded down. Mine turned out perfect because I install tape as a stopping point, but I could envision someone not being overly careful and chipping paint off the shaft above the ferrule during install. Once installed I haven’t found any paint issues, it seem rock hard and durable, but a word of caution on installation.
If you look at the 2008 REMAX Long Drive competition winners list, you will see House of Forged well represented in the top 10, better than any other company. With the young talent using their shafts, I can only see their presence growing on the LD circuit. National exposure and an excellent product will have HOF shafts making their way into the bags of us common golfers.
For more information:
www.whiteshaft.com
