Sunday, May 19, 2019

Gravity Grip

I know you are all excited about the Gravity Grip review.  Well, let us not tarry any longer...

I'll start with a video and then I'll add my comments.


As you will note from the video, the grip is asymmetrically weighted.  The idea being that the grip will seek to square the club face provided you've installed it correctly.  The grip needs to be perpendicular to the club face.  Then magic happens!

Mygolfspy.com has a video review of the grip too.  The guy there found that his ability to return the club face to its initial face angle improved about 40%.  He was close to being plus or minus 1.0 degrees and with the grip he was down to 0.6 degrees.  Now you have to be withing 1 degree to make a 10 foot putt.

The guy took the grip back to the lab and did more exhaustive testing.  He did find that the grip provided a fair amount of help squaring the club face.

I ordered it from Amazon and when it came took it and my putter over to Jake at the local driving range.   I would have installed it myself, but I wanted to get the original grip off without damage.  I don't have the tools for that, I usually cut them off.  I expected Jake to loosen the glue then use compressed air to pop it off.  It turned out to be a bit tougher than that as Jake inserted a rod down the grip and added tape solvent as he went.  Considerable strength was applied to drive the rod down.  He managed to get it off without damage, though there was a expectation that it wasn't going to happen that way.

He installed the Gravity Grip and off I went.

I got to play with it a couple of times this week.  I've been rolling the ball well and that continued.  My problem is not being able to start the ball on my intended line.  I would suspect that the grip helped with this.  I had a couple of birdies and for the most part putted well.  There were a couple of three putts when I got the speed wrong and I stubbed one putt too.  I'm not convinced that this is the acme of grips, but I'm not convinced it was a waste of money either.

Let me add some remarks about what it felt to swing the club with this grip.  Sonny had tried it before when he was at the Evnroll factory.  He felt it made the club head feel light and he didn't like it.   I was a bit worried about that, as I like the heavy weight of the Evnroll putter heads.  After installation I didn't find the club's head weight to be much different.  The grip is a different profile from the old one.  It is move oval and fills my fingers better.  I like the new shape.  I could feel the weight in the sense that the club shaft and head seemed more connected.  As I swung the club with a very light grip, the face seemed happy to track along and I didn't feel I was throwing the head or that it was lagging.  That was a useful tendency and I've no objection to it.


I'm driving the in the car a couple of days later and thinking about the putter and it occurred to me that there is a trade off here.  With a weight positioned "off" the shaft, the inherent tendency of the putter face to swing has to be affected.  The "face hang" would be lessened by the counter weight, would be another way to think of this.  I initially thought that the weight would just dampen and inhibit the swing, but as I type this another possibility occurs to me that the face opening and closing might just happen more quickly as the hands seek to keep the weight at its low point. I like to think I move the putter back and forth with minimal opening and closing of the face, but this might be wrong.  Certainly with short putts you don't want a wildly long swing.  The connectedness of the face to grip (see last paragraph!) is probably the effect of this weight change.

So I've added another variable to the golf mix.  Keeps me young I hope! 



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