Wichita aircraft bench
One note from the long iron through the pitching wedge
Letter flex is a box stamp. We clamp the finished club, tick cycles per minute, and walk neighbor to neighbor until the stair is honest. The bag should feel like one instrument, not a pile of blanks that never sat on the same vise.
Why 7 a.m. on Broadway
Aircraft-shift hours, because graphite lies after lunch
Wichita still runs on first-shift metrology. We borrowed that clock. The hangar at 219 S Broadway opens at seven, while the suite is still cool and the Kansas air has not cooked the blanks. A tick taken at 2 p.m. on a July day is a different number than the same iron at 7:10. We log dry-bulb and relative humidity on every work order so a winter recert can be compared to the original stair.
Friday we cut the day at noon. That is not a lifestyle choice. The vises share a wall with a machine shop that starts weekend noise after lunch, and a frequency capture is useless if the microphone is listening to a mill instead of a shaft.
What the microphone hears
A CPM number is a neighbor, not a personality test
Flex-profile boards ask how a naked blank bends. We ask whether the 7-iron and the 8-iron, already headed and gripped, speak within a few cycles of each other. Tip trim, head mass, and a winter of dry air all move the number. Matching a set means writing a stair — 4-iron slower, pitching wedge quicker — and then chasing the clubs that jump the step.
We will talk about shafts in the body of a work order because CPM lives in the tube. We will not pretend a gram scale or a deflection board is the same instrument. Those shops exist. This one ticks.
- Finished club in the vise, not a raw blank on a board
- Neighbor delta written before any reshaft talk
- Master 6-iron bar re-ticked every open morning
- Humidity logged; winter recerts compared to the original sheet
Clamp menu, short version
Irons first. Woods speak a different language.
Primary
Iron neighbor stair
4-iron through pitching wedge on one sheet. This is the job the hangar was built for.
Separate stair
Wedge ticks
Shorter, heavier heads. We do not glue them onto the iron stair and call it a day.
The rest
Woods, hybrids, putter fixture
Optional captures. Different clamp geometry. Read the menu before you assume a full-bag tick.
From the work-order pile
Players who already sat in the vise
My 6 and 7 used to feel like two different companies. After the neighbor match, the 7 just continues the 6. I stopped guessing which iron would jump.