Full Set Session
Two and a half hours, the majority of it on grass. Irons are the clubs that touch the ground on every swing, which makes them the category where a mat fitting goes wrong quietest.
Eight Clubs, One Set of Decisions
A driver fitting resolves a single club. An iron fitting resolves a family of them, and the family has to behave as a unit. The 9-iron and the 5-iron need to share a lie progression, a shaft feel and a swing weight relationship, or the set will have two or three clubs that quietly never get used.
That is why we build from the bottom up. Your scoring irons are the ones you hit most and the ones where a small error costs the most strokes, so their specs are fixed first and the longer clubs are built to agree with them. It is the reverse of how most sets get sold, which start with whichever iron the player happened to hit well on the demo day.
The turf block comes first
Chalk on the sole, twenty-five to thirty swings off live Bermuda with your current 7-iron and 5-iron. We photograph the divots, measure where each one begins relative to the ball, and record how far the low point wanders. On dormant winter turf this exercise is unflattering and extremely informative; on lush July grass it is more forgiving and we adjust our reading accordingly.
What comes out of that block is a description of your ground contact: whether the leading edge digs, whether the trailing edge bounces you into a thin strike, whether the heel is grabbing before the toe. That description determines sole grind and lie angle, and those two specs are worth more to a mid handicap player than any shaft on the wall.
Then the arithmetic indoors
Once ground contact is understood we go inside and put numbers on it. Delivered loft, spin loft, descent angle, strike height and carry dispersion, measured across candidate heads and shafts in short blocks so fatigue does not contaminate the result.
Carry distance matters here, but mostly as a gapping input rather than a headline. A set where every club carries evenly spaced distances with a descent angle steep enough to hold a green is a good set. A set where the 6-iron goes eight yards further than last year but lands flat and releases into the back bunker is not, regardless of what the number said.
What Actually Gets Chosen
Sole Grind and Width
How the bottom of the head interacts with your turf. Steep players on tight Florida lies usually want more relief through the trailing edge than they have been sold.
Lie Angle Progression
Set on grass rather than from a lie board alone, and progressed correctly across the set rather than bent to a single number.
Length and Swing Weight
Usually standard or slightly under. Matched across the set so no single iron feels like a visitor from another family.
Shaft Weight and Profile
Weight before flex, every time. Constant weight versus ascending weight is decided by how your long irons behave, not by preference.
Head Model and Blending
A blended set is normal and slightly more forgiving heads in the long irons is usually the right answer, not a compromise.
Set Composition
Where the set starts and stops. Many players are better served by a 5-iron through pitching wedge and a hybrid above it.
Two Clubs That Fly the Same Distance
It is startlingly common. Modern iron lofts have been strengthened over two decades while wedge lofts largely have not, and the result is a bag where the pitching wedge and the gap wedge are eleven yards apart while the 4-iron and 5-iron are separated by four.
We map every carry distance in the bag during the session and print the chart. Sometimes the conclusion is that you need a different set. Frequently the conclusion is that you need one fewer long iron and one more wedge, which costs a great deal less.
The chart is yours regardless of what you decide to do about it.