Putter Bench
Head mass against green speed, shaft lean, counterweighting under the cap, and length taken from your eye line rather than a chart.
Putter details
Memphis · Bench No. 1 opened 2011
A Golf Club Is a Weight Problem Before It Is a Brand Decision
Putter Lab Golf builds and rebuilds clubs around measured mass. Head grams, tip weight, grip weight, shaft raw weight, balance point, finished swingweight — all of it goes on a ledger card that travels with the club. If a number in your bag drifts three years from now, we can tell you exactly what it used to be.
Gram scale accurate to 0.1 g
Two assembly benches, one measuring station
Walk-in regrips most weekdays
0.1 g
Scale resolution
±0.5
Swingweight tolerance held
14
Years at this address
6,100+
Ledger cards on file
Where the confusion starts
Two Clubs Can Weigh the Same and Swing Nothing Alike
Put a wedge on a kitchen scale and you get its static weight — a single number covering everything from the butt cap to the sole. That number tells you almost nothing about how the club behaves at the top of a backswing, because it ignores where the mass sits along the shaft.
Move eight grams from under the grip cap down to the hosel and static weight does not change at all. Swingweight moves roughly two full points. Golfers describe the second club as "heavier", "clunkier", or "harder to turn over" — and they are right, even though the scale disagrees with them.
Our whole method is built to keep those two numbers in separate columns and decide each one on purpose.
Read the Weight Guide
Same 432 g, two balance points
Butt
Build A — 26.4 in
Build B — 24.8 in
Static weight, both builds432 g
Build A swingweightC9
Build B swingweightD4
Felt difference by testersObvious
What we hold ourselves to
Tolerances Are Published, Not Implied
Most shops will happily tell you a set is "matched". Very few will tell you what matched means in grams. We write our tolerance band on the wall by the door and on the back of every ledger card, so there is a number to argue with instead of a vibe.
Holding a set inside half a swingweight point is not difficult work. It is patient work: weigh the heads before they go anywhere near an epoxy gun, sort them, and pick which head goes to which shaft based on what the scale says instead of what the number stamped on the sole says.
The heads arrive with variation. That is normal and no scandal. What matters is whether the builder measured before assembly or after the customer complained.
Walk the Bench Sequence
Posted Build Tolerances
On the wall
Length, each club± 1/32 in
Loft, irons and wedges± 0.5°
Lie, irons and wedges± 0.5°
Swingweight across a set± 0.5 pt
Grip weight matching± 2 g
Epoxy cure before pickup18 hrs min
Anything outside these bands comes apart and gets rebuilt at our
cost. We would rather eat a shaft than send out a set that reads uneven.
The ledger method
Five Stages, Roughly Ninety Minutes
Nothing here is theatre. Each stage produces a number that gets written down, and the number from the stage before it decides what happens next.
01
Intake & Audit of What You Own
Your current clubs go on the scale and the loft-lie machine before we discuss anything new. Roughly half our visitors discover their existing set is already uneven — and that finding alone changes what they should buy.
02
Hand and Posture Measurements
Glove size, wrist-to-floor, hand span across the palm, and how hard you hold the club at address. This is what sets grip core, tape count, and starting length — not your height alone.
03
Test Heads on Adjustable Assemblies
We hit shortlisted combinations built on reusable adapters, with weight ports we can load in two-gram steps between shots. You feel the change while the previous swing is still fresh.
04
Write the Mass Plan
Target static weight, target balance point, target swingweight, and where the grams will come from to reach them. You approve the plan before a single component is cut.
05
Assembly, Cure, and Card
Built on our own benches, cured overnight, re-measured cold the next morning, then released with the printed ledger card and any leftover tip weights taped to it.
What comes to the bench
Six Build Categories
The measuring station is the same for all of them. What changes is which grams we are allowed to move and how much room the category gives us.
Driver Build
Total weight decided first, then loft and face setting. Adapter torque logged so the club can be pulled and rebuilt without guesswork.
Driver detailsIron Set Build
Heads sorted by measured mass before assembly so the progression up the set is smooth instead of accidental.
Iron detailsFairway Wood Build
Length and sole weighting worked together so the club sits down off tight Memphis lies instead of sitting up on its heel.
Fairway detailsHybrid Build
Weighted to sit between your longest iron and your shortest wood, rather than inheriting whatever came in the box.
Hybrid detailsWedge Build
Head grams, bounce, and grind chosen against bermuda turf and the sand your home course actually uses.
Wedge details
Component room
We Stock Grams, Not Endcaps
No manufacturer pays us for shelf position and no line carries a monthly quota. That means the component room is organised by weight class and flex profile rather than by logo, which is a strange thing to walk into the first time and an obvious thing by your second visit.
If a build calls for a shaft we do not keep on hand, we order the raw shaft rather than pushing you toward the nearest thing in the rack. Ordering costs a few days. Compromising costs a season.
See the component lines| Rack | Sorted by | On hand |
|---|---|---|
| Wood shafts | Raw weight, 5 g bands | 90+ SKUs |
| Iron shafts | Weight and step pattern | 60+ SKUs |
| Grips | Core size and finished grams | 70+ SKUs |
| Tip & butt weights | Gram value | 2 g – 30 g |
| Ferrules | Bore and taper | 18 profiles |
| Putter shafts | Bend style | 12 patterns |
Asked at the counter
Four Things People Check Before Booking
The longer list lives on the questions page, but these four come up almost every week.
All questions answeredNo. A large share of our work is rebuilding what people already own
— reshafting, rebalancing, regripping, adjusting loft and lie. If your current heads are
good, we will tell you so and save you the purchase.
Single-club sessions take about an hour. Iron sets run ninety minutes.
A full bag audit is booked as two visits, because measuring fourteen clubs properly and then
hitting them is more than one sitting can hold.
The opposite, if anything. A player with a repeating swing can mask a
badly balanced club. A newer player usually cannot, which is exactly why the mass plan matters more
for them.
Then we say so and you leave with your money and a printed audit of
your existing clubs. We would rather lose a build than sell one that will not change anything.
Owner feedback
What Ends Up on the Comment Card
★★★★★They weighed my irons before we talked about anything. Three of them were off by more than a swingweight point from the rest of the set, and I had been blaming my hands for two seasons.
Roland PettigrewIron set rebuild · Cordova
★★★★★I came in for a putter and left with an explanation of why my old one felt dead on fast greens. The counterweight under the cap was the whole fix. Under a hundred dollars.
Delia MarchettiPutter bench · Germantown
★★★★★The ledger card is the part nobody else does. I took it to a shop in Nashville while travelling and they built a replacement wedge to match without a single phone call to Memphis.
Aaron Whitlock-BeyWedge build · Midtown
Booking
Bring the Clubs You Actually Play
The fastest sessions start with your current bag on our scale. Bring whatever you have, however old it is — the audit is where the useful information comes from, and the session fee comes off any build we do for you within sixty days.