Question 31

Thanks,
Barry

Dear Barry,

The design criteria incorporated several features:

They had a short lever arm length, but it had to be big enough so that psychologically you would not have a problem hitting the ball. To meet that objective we designed a more traditional, classic looking iron. Some say it resembles the McGregor MTs of the past. However, we removed the rounded top portion of the classic irons.

A substantial amount of weight needed to placed directly behind the center of the club face. This feature keeps the center of gravity in the middle and closer to the hosel which is the axis of rotation.

The center of gravity is flexible so a you can have a low center of gravity for a beginning golfer, and a high center of gravity for experienced, tour quality golfers. This is the piece of the puzzle where you are trying to achieve the proper launch angle, spin ratio, and trajectory. Every golf swing needs a club suited to its swing speed, angle of attack and hand position at impact. By being able to adjust the center of gravity we can do what no other club manufacturer can do - that is adjust the club so it's right for your swing. We also fit the shaft flex to your swing, and we carefully insert the shafts into the hosel so the spline locations are all correct.

The overall weight had to be adjustable so you could use the heads as a junior golfer. I have an eight year old son and he was four when he started using these clubs. There are no quality players that I know of who don't have their own special grind or weight of the golf club. Some like Moe Norman use extremely heavy clubs, others prefer a much lighter head weight. The weight port feature allow these irons to be the most versatile fitting club ever.

The material used for the heads is easy to bend to adjust lie angles and lofts. The lie angle is especially important. Golfers need different lie angles to accomodate their individual address position, or back injuries or other physical complications. A clean, classic look was important with straight sight lines with balance from hosel to toe. Proper balance allows the allows the club to sit in your hands with a comfortable square face. Take most any club off the shelf and swing it full to the finish postion, and return it down directly in front of your body. You will find that the club will balance the left in a closed position. This hook fault correction is an anti-slice position.

My clubs balance straight up an down. With a single axis swing you don't need fault correction. You need true dynamic balancing that doesn't influence your swing path or face position. If you have a club designed for rotation you must use energy and you're literally fighting your swing because the club wants to move off line.

These clubs are about technical excellence, not marketing. I refuse to put any club on the market that isn't technically superior, and keeping with what science demands.

Yes, I'd say IMA clubs are correctly designed.

Thanks for the chance to explain our clubs.

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One feature left out is we use a proprietary head and grip weighting technique that gives a five to ten percent advantage, i.e., with our weighting technique you'll get five to ten percent more club head speed with the same physical effort. No other manufacturer understands the physics and as a result has not figuD90000 it out. In fact they're going the wrong way with lighter grips and shafts to concentrate the weight at the head. Precisely the wrong thing to do.

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