The folks at Golf Pride, Winn, Super Stroke, Lamkin, and all the other grip manufacturers aren’t going to like hearing this, but golf club grips are kind of, well… boring. I mean, let’s face it, the really exciting stuff happens at the business end of the club—the club head—right? And even shafts (which only have to be stiff and light, despite all the fancy talk that goes on about them) get a lot of attention for how they (supposedly) affect ball flight.
But grips—what’s exciting about grips? As long as they’re not slippery, they’re doing their job, right? How much room for innovation is there in the design of a tapered rubber sleeve that fits over the end of a club shaft to make it easier to hold onto the golf club? Well, based on what I have seen with the new Concept Helix grip from Golf Pride, there’s plenty.
The Concept Helix grip does away with the adhesive tape and solvents that conventional grips depend on to secure the grip to the shaft, utilizing instead some sort of mechanism that mechanically tightens the grip to the shaft (about which more later).
When I first learned about these grips I read that they require a minimum inside diameter in the shaft. I thought, “Surely they must mean outside diameter”, having in mind the idea of gripping the OD of the shaft, but upon inquiring, I was informed that the mechanism at the butt-end of the grip requires a minimum .480-inch inside diameter to fit inside the shaft. So what mechanism had they come up with that fits inside the shaft yet secures the grip to the outside of the shaft? My engineer’s curiosity was piqued.
The inquiry that answered my minimum-installation-diameter question led to an offer to send me a sample kit—three Concept Helix grips and an installation tool—to try out for myself. When they arrived I had just acquired a 3000-gram-capacity (6.6 pounds) precision scale and a swing weight scale for another equipment-related project, so I was all set to try out these intriguing new grips and get some quantitative data at the same time.
Installation
Installing these grips is a mechanically simple process, but it is also a pretty good hand and forearm workout. After removing the old grip and all traces of tape and adhesive from the target club, you slip the installation tool (the “horn”) over the club shaft just above the ferrule, prongs up. The horn is then slid up the shaft to the butt end and inserted into the open end of the Concept Helix grip.
Bracing the club head against the ground with your feet, you then slide the grip down the shaft, with one hand pushing the horn down while the other guides the top end of the grip. You will hear/feel a bit of a thump when the top of the grip is seated on the end of the shaft, at which point you remove the horn, reverse it, and place the tool’s hex over the “nut” in the end of the grip.
This is where the workout begins. Gripping the club head in one hand and holding the horn in the other, you twist the horn clockwise (remember—“right-tighty, left-loosey”). The instructions tell you that about 30 full turns of the club will do the trick, but then you remove the horn, and while gripping the club head again, twist the grip itself—bottom, middle, top—and then the white end cap, repeating until you can’t twist anymore. A few final turns with the horn on the nut (eight or ten will do it), and you’re finished.
All told, the install time for the Concept Helix for the first time was comparable to installing regular grips—maybe a bit longer if you are well-practiced with the usual grip-tape and solvent drill—the big advantage being the non-messy, non-smelly process.
How do they feel?
While I wasn’t able to get out and play with the two clubs I used in my installation trial, I made quite a number of trial swings with them out in the yard, and the grips felt very secure. The good news is that if the grips do loosen a bit, a few twists will snug them up again. (Whether this constitutes an illegal adjustment during play is a question for the USGA rules people.) The diameter of the installed Concept Helix grips fell somewhere between the Golf Pride Tour Velvet Standard and Midsize grips, and felt comfortable in my Cadet-Large glove-size hands.
Other factors
In preparation for this test I had weighed the two clubs on which I was going to be installing the Concept Helix grips—a six iron and a nine iron—and checked their swing weights. Those clubs, forged cavity-back designs fitted to True Temper Dynamic Gold S300 shafts with Midsize Golf Pride Tour Velvet grips, weighed in at 430.1 grams and 449.7 grams respectively, with swing weights of D4 and D3. The grips themselves weighed in at 55.1 grams for the regular Tour Velvet grip and 65.3 grams for the Concept Helix grip.
I rechecked the swing weight of the clubs after installing the Concept Helix grips and found that they had each gone down about one point, to D3 and D2, respectively—about what you would expect for adding 10 grams or so to the grip end, but not really noticeable to a normal golfer.
How do they work?
Lacking an x-ray machine to take a non-invasive look at the inner workings of the Concept Helix grip, I did what curious reverse-engineering investigators have always done—I disassembled one. (Actually, what I did was more of a dissection, because it involved sharp instruments and a patient that wasn’t going to be getting off the table under their own power.)
What lies under the butt end of the Concept Helix grip, I found, is a threaded rod running inside a rubber sleeve, with a nut (bonded to the rubber sleeve) at the end toward the club head, and a plastic ratchet mechanism at the other end. The rubber sleeve has an at-rest diameter of about .480 inches (hence the shaft ID requirement), and expands to grip the inside of the shaft when the nut is turned.
When I first saw the ads for these grips, influenced I guess by the graphics in the ads, I envisioned a helically wound mesh of wire or fiber which necked down and squeezed the rubber body of the grip against the club shaft. What I found when I opened one up was that the main body of the grip is just rubber, so the rest of the manner of operation of the Concept Helix grip lies, I believe, within the mysteries of the properties of the rubber that makes up the grip.
The properties of polymer materials (rubber, plastics, etc.) is not my area of expertise; in my career as a mechanical engineer I have most often dealt with, and am much more comfortable with, metallic materials. I do know that some rubber materials react to physical strain in interesting ways, and the engineers at Golf Pride, who obviously know a thing or two about rubber, have figured out how to make these properties work for them.
Does the pattern on the outside of the grip, a cross-hatch of shallow grooves about 4/10 of an inch in length, pointing up and to the left at an angle of about 45º to the long axis of the grip/shaft, crossed near the midpoint by much-shorter V-shaped perpendicular notches, have anything to do with it? I’m guessing that the answer is “yes”, but I’m also guessing that the Golf Pride engineers would change the subject if one were to ask.
The bottom line
It will be interesting to see whether the Concept Helix grips catch on. They are not necessarily that much quicker to install than conventional glue-on grips or compressed-air grips—but they are much less messy, can be very easily removed, and require only one tool, albeit a very specialized one: the horn. They offer no modification options—there is no putting a few extra wraps of tape under the grip here or there to fine-tune the fit—and they come in only one size (so far), but they offer a fit and feel that is right in the sweet spot of Golf Pride’s Tour Velvet models.
Their primary attraction may lie in the clean, simple installation process, for golfers who want to, or have to, be able to re-grip their own clubs but who lack the facilities—a workshop, garage, or a spare room and an understanding spouse—which conventional grips require. Whether that is enough to sustain them in the market, only time will tell.
(Cost of the Concept Helix grips is $9.99 each, with a minimum purchase of three grips, including the horn. For more information, and to order, go to www.concepthelix.com.)
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