If you have been following my posts here for long enough you will have read (I hope…) several columns on the subject of putting, from why putting is hard, to how counterweighting your putter can help you make more putts, and how a graphite putter shaft can help (but not for the reasons generally touted by the folks who sell them.)
Like most golfers with something of an equipment addiction I own several putters, and consistent with my education and experience as a mechanical design engineer, I like to tinker with them. The five putters which I actually play (I have two or three more which are essentially antiques, of value only as curiosities) have all been bent more upright (within USGA limits, of course), tweaked as to loft (I prefer minimal to slightly negative loft – here’s why) and counterweighted for better balance and therefore better speed control.
The most recent addition to my stable is a self-built putter based on a Ben Hogan Golf BHB-01 plumber’s neck blade putter head. I installed the shaft that came with my Odyssey Golf Tank Cruiser 1 putter—which was re-shafted, for a while, with an early version of the BGT Stability Shaft (about which more here)—and my preferred Odyssey White Hot pistol-style grip. I drilled out the threaded fitting in the butt end of the Odyssey shaft to allow me more options for counterweighting than just the 15- and 30-gram counterweights that came in the Odyssey’s weight kit, and opened up a hole in the end of the Odyssey grip to allow the fitting of one of the range of Super Stroke Counter Core counterweights (25-gram, 50-gram, or 75-gram). I also filed an alignment mark on the top line and filled it with white paint.
The Odyssey Tank Cruiser, meanwhile, had the BGT Stability Shaft replaced with a $15 standard steel shaft. To reduce toe hang I removed the weight from the toe port in the sole, replacing it with cork, and installed a 20-gram weight in the heel port. I installed an Odyssey White Hot pistol-style grip, and opened up the hole in the butt end to take a Super Stroke counterweight.
While the Ben Hogan-based putter is a “bitsa” build—put together from “bits of this and bits of that”—the real Frankenstein’s monster in my putter stable is the continuously evolving build that started out as a $17 new-old-stock Tight Lies blade putter that I purchased online. This putter, in one of its several modified iterations, was the one that I had in my bag in May 2019 when I played Pebble Beach during the USGA’s media day for the U.S. Open. It was a day that had its ups and downs, but one in which I had a great round on the greens, with eleven two-putt greens, and four one-putts.
Aside from a bit of tweaking for lie and loft, the first big change for this putter was the installation of the stock Odyssey shaft (with the 30-gram counterweight) when my Odyssey Tank Cruiser was getting fitted with the BGT Stability Shaft. From there I went to a more radical change, cutting down and transplanting a graphite shaft into the Tight Lies head—the shaft, an Aldila 350, came from a donor club: the driver that was part of my first set of garage-sale used clubs. As I explain in my column about the benefits of a graphite putter shaft, removing mass from the middle of the length of the club increases stability and improves speed control; “Frankenstein”, as I have dubbed the Tight Lies putter, was my first test bed for the benefits of this concept.
This putter went through several subsequent iterations that involved increasing amounts of lead tape on the head, with corresponding increases in counterweighting, all intended to bring it up to the same overall mass and swing weight as the modified Odyssey Tank. Damage to the shaft that occurred during a bout of loft/lie adjustment spelled the end of that particular experiment, so I decided to take it a step further.
Enter the latest iteration of the Tight Lies putter, dubbed Frankenstein III. It now incorporates a brand new graphite shaft, this time a Mitsubishi Rayon KURO KAGE Black Parallel iron shaft, stiff flex, .370 tip, cut down to yield my preferred 35-inch total length. To make the installation of a butt-end counterweight cleaner I sacrificed a Super Stroke grip for the threaded fitting which takes the Counter Core family of weights. Previous grip modifications to accommodate a grip weight involved drilling a hole in the butt end of the grip to a size that allowed the threads on the counterweight to bite into the rubber of the grip; gluing in the plastic threaded fitting from a Super Stroke grip makes the installation a bit tidier.
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| Frankenstein III, in all its glory |
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| Shiny-new stiff-flex graphite shaft |
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| Logo partly covered by the grip shows that the shaft has been cut down |
To complete the build I installed a 75-gram Super Stroke Counter Core weight. With a head weight of 391.8 grams, a shaft weight of 56.2 grams (less than half the weight, and at $29.95 less than 1/6 the cost, of the BGT Stability shaft), a grip weight of 67.2 grams, and an actual 74.0 grams of counterweight (plus a smidge for grip tape and adhesive) yields an all-up weight of 592.2 grams, or about 1 lb 5 oz. Thanks to the lack of the added lead tape that had previously been wrapped around the shaft of the 75-gram counterweight, this is about 20 grams shy of the weight of the previous iteration, and that of the modified Odyssey Tank. Loft remains at -1º, and the lie angle is 1º shy of the USGA limit, at 79º.
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| The 75-gram counterweight installed in my preferred Odyssey putter grip |
The swing weight of “Frankenstein III” is E5, making it a touch more head-heavy than its previous iteration at E4, and considerably more so than the modified Odyssey Tank, at D4, and the Hogan BHB-01 build, at D0. The new build feels well-balanced, and I have found it to be consistent and controllable when practicing on my office carpet (which stimps at about 13–14); I can’t wait for our current bout of rainy weather to end so that I can go try it out on real greens.
Playing around with putters is considerably easier and less critical than building or rebuilding full-swing clubs; because of the lower forces experienced by a putter during use you don’t have to worry so much about whether you got the crucial head-to-shaft bond exactly right. Even if you don’t go so far as to re-shaft a putter, a little bit of tinkering with counterweights in the grip and lead tape on the head may surprise you with the benefits that are derived from improving the balance of your “flat stick”.
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