Dear Titaniummd,
This question first calls for addressing the underlying issue: what is swingweight and in what respect does it play a role in putting? Then we can address the issues of what effect does cutting a putter down have on swingweight and whether and how the swingweight should be adjusted after cutting the putter down.
Swingweight is an artificial concept that uses a balance point along the shaft to place a number on the ratio of weight / mass distributed on the putter head side of the balance point to the weight / mass on the grip side of the balance point. The "number scheme" uses a combination of letters and numerals with eleven steps per letter ranging from A to G, A-0 being the "lightest" and G-10 being the "heaviest" ratios.
WHAT IS SWINGWEIGHT?
This table explains swingweighting for woods and irons (
click here).
Gary Mayes explains the basic idea:
"
The Basics of Swingweight
Gary Mayes, Equip2Golf, Inc.
Have you ever noticed that some clubs feel heavier than others? The weight of a golf club is measured in terms of two variables: total weight and swingweight. Total weight refers to the weight of a complete golf club and is usually expressed in grams. The difference in the heaviness of a club is usually attributed to the design variable known as "swingweight". What is swingweight? Simply put, swingweight is an approximation of how heavy a club feels. Here is a more formal definition:
A measurement that indicates the weight distribution of a golf club around a fixed fulcrum point. It is usually expressed by a letter and number indicator such as A1, B2, C3, D1, etc.
Swingweight is measured using a swingweight scale as shown below. The device was invented by Kenneth Smith in the 1940s and uses a 14" fulcrum capable of reading the club's swingweight as well as total weight.
Generally, men's clubs are swingweighted in the low "D" range while women's clubs are in the low to mid "C" range. So why should you care? Typically, a golfer with too light of a club swingweight may have difficulty controlling the club. A golfer with a quick powerful swing may have tendency to swing over the top (i.e. casting). A golfer with too heavy of a club swingweight may feel that he is dragging the club behind. In either case, the resulting swing is less than desirable.
Several factors affect a club's swingweight. The weight of a club's head, shaft, and grip all play a part in determining the club's swingweight. Other equally important factors include the weight and balance point of the shaft and the finished club's length.
How can a club's swingweight be altered? For reference, it is noted that one swingweight point is equal to approximately 2 grams in the clubhead. Given this approximation we can look at the effects of grips and shaft lengths on swingweight. A standard grip (~51 grams) accounts for about 9-10 swingweight points at the butt end of the club. If you reduce the weight in the grip end of a club by 4 grams, the resulting swingweight will increase by 1 swingweight point. If you shorten a club by 1/2" the swingweight will decrease by approximately 3 swingweight points. Conversely, if you lengthen a club by 1/2" the swingweight will increase by approximately 3 swingweight points. Another method to increase swingweight is to add lead tape to the clubhead. A 1/2" wide strip of lead tape 4 1/2" long weighs approximately 2 grams and will add 1 swingweight point to the club. Keep in mind that some of these methods while altering the club's swingweight will also alter the club's total weight.
Swingweight is directly related to feel and golfers need to understand the relationship in order to get equipment best suited for their game. As with other aspects of clubfitting, it is important to experiment with different swingweights to identify the best feel and result. For futher assistance with swingweight and how it relates to your game, see your local PGA professional or accredited clubmaker."
Brent Kelly explains the idea in more detail:
"
Understanding Swingweight
What Is Swingweight, and Does Every Golfer Need to Worry about It?
By Brent Kelley, About.com
Swingweight is a factor that casual golfers rarely concern themselves with and serious golfers often concern themselves with.
But what is it, and is it something with which you need to be concerned?
In non-technical terms, swingweight is a measure of how the weight of the club feels when it's swung. Why is it important? Because if your clubs do not match in swingweight, they may not all feel the same to you during your swing.
As for the technical definition of swingweight, here's how clubmaker Ralph Maltby describes it: "The measurement of a golf club's weight about a fulcrum point which is established at a specified distance from the grip end of the club."
Michael Lamanna, Director of Instruction at The Academy at La Cantera in San Antonio, Texas, puts Maltby's definition in easier-to-understand terms: "Swingweight is a balance measurement and is the degree to which the club balances toward the clubhead." If Club A has a balance point closer to the clubhead than Club B, then Club A will feel heavier in the swing.
So there are different ways of saying it, but it comes back to how the weight of the club feels during the swing.
Swingweight and the actual weight of the club are different things, and understanding the difference goes a long way toward understanding the role of swingweight.
The actual weight of a golf club is expressed in grams. Swingweight is expressed as "C10" or "D1" or some other combination of letter and number (more on that in a sec). Those measurements are taken using a swingweight scale, the contraption pictured at the top of this article.
Take a club, say a 3-iron. Imagine adding lead tape to the 3-iron. No matter where you put the lead tape, the actual weight of the club will be identical. That is, if the lead tape is on the clubhead, at the middle of the shaft or on the grip, the club's actual weight will be the same - the original weight of the club plus the weight of the lead tape.
Now imagine swinging that 3-iron with the lead tape on the clubhead, then at the middle of the shaft, then on the grip. How much weight you feel you are swinging will be different depending on where the lead tape has been added - even though the total weight of the club is identical in all three instances. That's swingweight.
The key application of swingweight is in matching the clubs within a set. You want all your clubs to feel the same weight during the swing. If you are replacing a club or adding one, you want the new club to match the swingweight of your current clubs.
But how important is swingweight, really? Recreational golfers who fancy themselves equipment "experts" - you know the type - might argue that it is very important, and for many golfers, they are right.
But not everyone is convinced that swingweight is something most recreational golfers need to lose sleep over.
Lamanna, for one, says, "In my experience, most players can only sense large differences in swingweights, and even Tour pros have a hard time telling the difference in swingweight between clubs with different shafts."
Lamanna says the focus seems to be shifting back to total weight as the key weight measurement. "It seems in the past 10 years there has been a reduced emphasis on swingweight by club manufacturers. The overall weight of the club - in particular the shaft gram weight - is these days the measurement upon which they focus.
"Research indicates that lighter shafts are, in general, better for the average golfer. Less weight produces shots of greater distance and accuracy for beginning and intermediate players. The low handicappers and pros have higher swing speeds, more control over the movements of the club and they possess an acute sense of 'feel' for the head of the club. The shafts best suited for them typically are higher in gram weight and have heavier swingweights."
Perhaps the moral is that it is ideal to have a set of clubs that match in swingweight, but for most golfers it is not critical, so long as the swingweights of the individual clubs are close.
Swingweight is expressed with a letter and number; "C10," for example.
The letters used are A, B, C, D, E, F and G, and the numerals 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10. Each combination of letter and number is known as a "swingweight point," and there are 77 possible swingweight measurements.
A0 is the lightest measurement, progressing up to the heaviest, G10. If you feel your clubs are too light in the swing, then you'll want to go up the scale; too heavy, down the scale.
The manufacturers' standard for men's clubs is D0 or D1, and for women's clubs, C5 to C7.
Swingweight can be adjusted post-production by adding lead tape or changing out components (i.e., going to larger clubhead, or a different shaft or grip, or trimming the shaft). Custom clubmakers can also adjust swingweight in some cases by adding different types of fill material inside shafts at different points, or inside clubheads."
So, "swingweight" indicates the "heaviness feel" of the club and is usually meant to be used to make the various clubs in the set all the SAME swingweight for consistency in "feel" and "swing". But, going a little more deeply, "swingweight" is actually only "felt" when the club is in motion, because the swingweight is really more about how the inertial properties of the mass-in-motion express themselves against the tactile sensors in the hands on the grip. No swing, no swingweight. But the "swing" spoken about here is one in which there is an inertial difference between the motion of the putter and the motion of the hands on the putter grip. In other words, unless the club "swings in the hands" as opposed to the club and the hands "riding together in the same swing", there is no "swingweight". When the motion of the hands and the grip / putter are the same in free-fall, there is no difference in the inertial features of the hands and the club, so there is no "swingweight" in free-fall or in weightless space. The earth's gravitational field becomes "weightless" when an object is allowed to free-fall, since only opposition to mass in gravity creates a sensation of "weight."
Weight is not the same as mass. Mass is independent of any gravitational field on any planet, whereas weight depends on the specific planet. But when two objects experience the SAME acceleration downward in motion, the masses as a factor are eliminated as an influence determining the motion pattern, which is a state known as "free-fall". In free-fall, the "gravity" operates to generate the SAME motion on all objects regardless of mass differences of the various objects (see Galileo, many years ago).
When a golf ball is perched on my outstretched palm as I and the golf ball stand inside an elevator on the 102nd floor of the Empire State Building, the ball has mass (45 grams, or slugs in the British system) and the mass has "weight" (Newtons, or ounces or pounds in the British system) on the tactile sensors of my palm ONLY because my palm is opposing the downward falling of the ball to the center of the earth. If, however, someone cuts the elevator cable so that both the ball and my palm free-fall together towards the center of the earth, then there is no opposition between my palm and the ball, and accordingly there is no "weight" of the ball against the tactile sensors of my palm.
Hence, "swingweight" only exists when there is a difference between the motion of the grip and the motion of the hands, as exists during the takeaway move or in a stroke / swing that includes "lagging" the clubhead behind the hands or allowing the clubhead to continue when the hands slow or stop (at the top of the backstroke, thru impact, and at the top of the thru-stroke). All of these are "handsy" strokes.
No "handsy" swing, no swingweight.
WHAT EFFECT DOES SHORTENING A PUTTER SHAFT HAVE ON SWINGWEIGHT?
Roughly speaking, each 1/2 inch cut off the shaft, replacing the same grip again, loses 3 swingweight points. A D6 would become a D3, for example.
SO, SHOULD YOU CARE?
Probably not, unless your stroke is a "handsy" stroke. It may well be that there is always some degree of handsiness in every stroke, due to the utter necessity of some inertial difference between hands and putter at takeaway and also due to the imperfection of ALLOWING no further human effort once the stroke is started into a swinging back and forth pattern. Most human golfers cannot do this, or at least cannot do this completely and consistently. So there is usually some remaining issue of swingweight that may be paid attention to, if you are so inclined.
Personally, I advise paying attention to total weight of the club, and not swingweight. That is, does the club feel "nicely heavy" when simply suspended motionless in the setup with relaxed arms and hands? In other words, ignore the difference in "feel" once the stroke begins to move. This is the reason I teach "feel nothing" in the hands as an indicator that the golfer is truly NOT moving the putter but is moving WITH the putter in a "no-difference" motion. The critical time for feeling this "nothing" in the hands and fingers is right thru the bottom of the stroke, when everything is headed "downwards" rather than partially sideways and partially downwards/upwards as occurs in a pendular swinging.
HOW TO ADJUST SWINGWEIGHT?
Assuming you care anyway, HOW do you adjust for the loss of swingweight points due to cutting down the shaft? The first question is whether you want to restore the SAME swingweight or a different one. Who says the original swingweight was the best for you? And why might they say that, never having met you and knowing nothing about your size, strength, and stroke movement features?
As we see above, the swingweight matching really stops when the set reaches the pitching wedge, and the "Tour preferred" putter swingweight is also not in line with the set as a whole but is somewhere near D5. Why is that? and Is this the best for you? Who knows.
If you want to change the swingweight after cutting down the shaft, you can use a heavier head, a lighter shaft, a lighter grip, or add some weight in the head area or inside the shaft near the head area (sand or salt etc. poured inside the hollow shaft or an inserted weight down inside the shaft).
I would encourage more artistry in "feeling" what is right for you and less technical exactitude, since there really isn't any such thing.
ALTERNATIVES
The main alternative to swingweight is total weight. Some putters are too light for you and some too heavy for you. Some "heavy" putters are too heavy for everyone. The telling point is whether the mass of the putter in the "takeaway" move necessitates excessive tightening of the hands and arms muscles and floppiness of the handle-hands relationship in order to drag / tug the static heavy putter back from its resting place at address.
Another alternative is the center-of-mass approach, in which the total / singular location for the putter-as-a-whole's center of gravity (COG) or center of mass (COM) is the key factor in how the putter "feels" when in motion in the stroke. This factor is real, not invented (as is also total weight, but total weight is not as key as COG to how a putter actually swings and feels).
The analogy is an ice skater spinning with arms outstretched and then drawing the arms inward to a folded-across-the-chest position. This moves the COG of the skater in closer to the spindle, like concentrating the mass of an old LP album in towards the spindle of the record player's turntable. The shifting of the COG inward makes the skater spin faster, as the inertial properties of the outstretched hands and arms are not opposing the spinning with as much opposition when drawn inward.
So a putter design that moves the COG closer to the golfer's "spindle" in a stroke motion makes the stroke as a whole (golfer plus putter) experience less opposition to the motion around an arc.
If the golfer makes a horizonal arcing motion, then shifting the total system COG inward towards the body makes a big difference in feel -- less in the hands, more in the core of the body as a whole especially in the upper torso that turns the stroke. If the golfer makes a more vertically oriented arcing motion (with completely vertical to gravity along level surface), the shifting of the COG "inwards" means something not quite the same as in the horizontal case, but the notion of "closer in to the body" pretty much captures it anyway.
The "feel" is the difference between the "feel" of swinging a 1-meter stick with an orange stuck on the end and the difference of swinging a 0.5-meter stick with the same orange stuck on the end. At the extremes, the difference is the "feel" os swinging a 3-meter stick with an orange stuck on the end and swinging the upper torso with an orange in your shirt pocket.
The
Torpedo putter by my friend Timothy Winey uses this concept and certain other putter designs accomplish a similar effect with hoseling patterns and with putter head "heel" weighting schemes with the heel of the putter head heavier (more massive) than the toe end.
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
Putting Coach and Theorist
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