Project X Shafts

Chad Hall – That’s right, yeah. Now let’s look at, kind of, the Rifle family. You’ve got Project X which we sort of talked about – very, very stiff tip, the stiffest tip golf shaft on the planet, I guess is the best way to say it. If you’re looking for lowest ball flight and kind of the stiffest profile you can find, I’d tell everybody Project X is the shaft for them because that’s what it’s going to deliver.

Project X Flighted brings – I think everybody understands what Flighted is, Flighted technology makes the long irons softer and the short irons kind of progressively stiffer. So let’s all check our egos at the door, we all need help with the long irons, most of probably don’t even play a 2-iron any more, we’ve got a hybrid in the bag, but maybe some of us have taken out our 3-iron and some even 4-iron – but we all need help getting the ball launched and that’s what Flighted technology does. Obviously, Rifle Flighted does the exact same thing as far as Flighted technology, but the Project X family with the constant taper and all those different things that make Project X what it is, that’s the differentiation between those two. And, of course, if you had to look at Project X Flighted and Rifle Flighted, you would say Project X Flighted in general, would fly a little bit lower overall than Rifle Flighted would.

Rifle Frequency Matched, you’ve got a lot flexibility with what you’re trying to do from trimming scenarios, more of a softer tip product compared to certainly the Project X family. Rifle Lite is a light version of Rifle, and it’s actually, Rifle Lite is a pretty stiff golf shaft which would kind of moved away. . . Project X High Launch, sorry, yeah, Project X High Launch is just that, it’s a high launch version of Project X. So you’d have to say then, that does the Flighted connect the dots between the High Launch in the long irons and Project X in the short irons, yeah, that’s precisely what it does. The Grafalloy family – we’ve got Epic which is, you can’t even compare Epic to anything else, and I’m sure we’ll talk more about Epic a little bit more. Yeah, we’ll just leave that alone for right now because it is unlike anything else that’s ever been done. If you look at straight graphite, we’ve got Axis which sits at the top of the food chain for us. It is an ultra-exotic, ultra-premium shaft, we’ve got Smart Ply technology in it, which Don can talk a little bit more about in just a second and explain what that is. Then you’ve got the Pro Launch family which has been, of course, wildly successful for us.

You’ve got ProLaunch Blue, Blue flies high, that simple. ProLaunch Red, Red flies low, or more penetrating, if you want to say that. We introduced Red middle of last year to the Tour environment and had remarkable success. Never have, I think I can say pretty much say exclusively, no shaft manufacturer, including ourselves, ever launched a shaft and had more success as this shaft has. We won seven times in six consecutive weeks: we won three times on the Nationwide Tour, we won three times on the PGA Tour, and we won once on the Champions Tour alongside of one of the European Tour wins. So now we’ve got two options for that launch monitor tuned design, bringing that high ball flight with Blue and low ball flight with Red. Of course they all have our Blue Tip technology which was introduced in the original Blue shaft, which is heads were getting bigger, now we’re kind of stopping at that 460 range with the USGA regulations, but the whole Blue Micro-mesh technology was specifically to stabilize bigger heads and really has tangible performance benefits. Comp-NT was kind of our entry into nano-technology into graphite golf shafts which is really what, to confuse Epic’s technology with anything that’s been done in a graphite shaft, including Comp-NT, they’re not even an apples to apples comparison.

But what Comp-NT is, is sort of the tip of the iceberg. Let’s take carbon nano-tubes and impregnate the resin system of a graphite golf shaft where really the resin is critical because it holds the fibers together, but other than that it provides no structural integrity. It’s just a weight adder that is necessary to hold the graphite shaft together. We wanted to put some carbon nano-tubes in there to provide some improved strength properties, and what we found is it actually helped align the carbon fiber a little better too. So, a great design, but that really was the tip of the iceberg when you look at Epic, and Don, I’ll let you talk a little bit about Smart Ply that’s in Axis.