Barey Adams is at it again. Now almost 80, Adams — who back in the 1980s took a little company with a big idea, Adams Tight Lies, and turned the woods market upside down — is going for another grand slam home run with Breakthrough Golf Technology (BGT), a startup company he founded about three years ago. Currently, BGT’s sole product is a multi-material, standard-length, stabilized putter shaft, simply named “The Stability Shaft.”
Question: when was the last time you changed your putter shaft, or for that matter, even thought about it?
“When I first learned about the product I knew that it could be significant,” Adams said. “It’s a step forward in golf equipment technology. What has been rewarding for me is that the Stability Shaft works better for amateurs. Pros are great putters and while the shaft does help them, it’s the inconsistency of the amateur that it corrects most.”
The performance of the shaft was exhaustively tested with hundreds of putters using state-of-the-art high-speed cameras, robots, SAM Putt Lab, Quintic Ball Roll software and Trackman4. The result was to re-invent the putter shaft from the ground up.
There are four parts of the Stability shaft that work in concert to greatly improve putting performance. BGT calls this Advanced Materials Integration:
- Eight layers of high modulus carbon fiber specifically layered, wrapped and widened, with a no-taper design to greatly reduce torque.
- Through Finite Element Analysis, a lightweight 22g aluminum insert was developed and precisely located to reinforce flexural rigidity.
- A 7075-aluminum connector that helps to stiffen and reinforce. This versatility allows attachment to virtually any tip diameter of any putter, regardless of the bend profile.
- The stainless-steel tips have extremely consistent wall thicknesses for superior strength and are coated with a smoke PVD finish to add protection from corrosion and rusting.
Designed to improve any golfer’s game, the Stability Shaft delivers the face more squarely at impact for improved accuracy, solid feel and lower launch for a predictable roll, resulting in better distance control.
It’s a perfect synergy of technology and materials to improve putting performance.
Adams teamed with of one of the nicest, smartest and most experienced putter experts, Blair Phillip, to be his Vice President of R&D. Blair was formerly with YES! Golf which manufactured great putters with Blair’s designs.
According to Blair, “The Stability shaft is really an invention we came up with to address a problem with existing steel shafts in putters.” Additionally, as per Blair, “Putter [head] weights have gone up quite a bit in the past 20 to 30 years.”
The shaft weighs 125-grams. The graphite section (103 grams) represents the power, while the steel/aluminum section (22 grams) represents the stability. The shaft is best described as one that consists of a non-tapered graphite body with a steel tip section. A 22-gram aluminum insert sits inside the carbon-fiber tubing, and there is an aluminum connector to reinforce the shaft. The graphite body, steel-tip construction reminds one of the Aerotech SteelFiber shafts.
A testing group rolled putts with the Stability Shaft and the consensus was that it felt very similar to their current putters. As for a change in the weight/balance/feel of your putter, your putter will feel the same, and the overall weight is within a few grams of steel putter shafts.
Your swing weight may be slightly higher after installation; but this will enhance the stability of the putter head. Most of our testers felt that their putting improved and they experienced better distance control and consistency. My personal feeling was that it felt very stable and gave me the impression of being heavier, which in turn gave me more confidence, something which I enjoy from heavier putters. Moreover, with the advent of heavier putter head designs, the Stability Shaft stabilizes the twisting and turning of the head.
“That was part of our design intent, the goal was to improve performance without negatively impacting feel,” Adams said. “Other manufacturers have made shafts that limit flex and twist. Often, though, these products cause the putter to feel different than a player’s current model. One of the most important design criteria, and why it took three years to develop, is there must be no adjustment by the golfer. You can fix the oscillation problem with shafts that are extra wide or ones that are very heavy. But the problems in adjusting [to those types of shafts] are greater than the ones caused by the oscillating shaft.”
The company offers a one-year product warranty, which covers any defects that could happen during the normal course of play.
$199.99 | www.breakthroughgolftech.com
Barry Lotz, J.D., Ph.D. is the director of the Professional Golf Teachers Association of America. He currently works with 14 Tour Players on mental coaching, putting and scoring techniques.
