The golf blogs are rife with pictures of pro golf bags that provide their visitors with the inside scoop on golf products before they have been announced - let alone available - to the general public. It's fairly easy for them to snap a photo of a driver head or set of irons, but new shafts are a bit easier to hide.

That is, most new shafts. At the British Open, Darren Clarke was playing ProjectX graphite shafts in his driver, 3-wood, and hybrid. (That's two British Open wins in a row for the highly successful low-spin shaft, by the way.)

But it was Clarke's iron shafts that made me (and many other equipment junkies) go, hmm...

It turns out that those bronze beauties were also made by the parent company of ProjectX, True Temper Sports. After tapping my sources, I can tell you that there is way more to the T.T. Tour Prototype (code name Monaco) than the high end finish.

The limited-release shafts were referred to in a post British Open win press release as “T.T. Prototype” and described as follows:

“The new T.T. Tour Prototype is the first ever shaft designed with Variable Tip Design in every individual shaft in the set. The result is unequalled boring ball trajectory and spin control for each individual club.”

What that means is that each iron shaft is manufactured from its own "blank" which means that a 4-iron can be given higher launch and less stiffness than the 5-iron, and so forth. The technical name for these characteristics is "EI Profile" where the “E” stands for stiffness and the “I” represents shape. Not only is it more difficult to manufacture shafts with this degree of detail, it isn't practical for club manufacturers to assemble this way, when the customary method of mass-producing clubs involves cutting a more limited inventory to length.

All of this means you won't see the Monaco in a garden variety set of irons anytime soon. True Temper, however, is making a limited edition run of 1000 sets for discerning players who believe they can take advantage of newer steel shaft designs such as Monaco. These are available now through True Temper Performance Fitting Centers (www.performancefittingcenter .com).

I plan on acquiring, installing, and testing a set of these shafts in some brand new 2011 Titleist AP2 irons soon, and will post a review here.

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