What’s the reason for the metal shaft caps on some hickory golf clubs and how can you replace them? In this video, I share some background on those caps and why they’re not quite as appealing as you might think.
Hello! My name is Christian Williams and I’m an interactive golf historian and hickory golfer. If you’re new to the channel, welcome! I’m a high-handicap golfer with a love for the game that’s far greater than my ability to play it well … but I’m getting better. Follow along as I share my passion for the history of the game through collecting, repairing, and playing hickory golf with pre-1935, pre-1900, and even pre-1850 wood-shafted golf clubs.
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All right folks welcome back to the channel and back to the Hickory hacker Museum have a different camera angle for you this time to show you a different part of the museum and I’m sitting in the St Andrews Department right here uh two pictures basically of St Andrews and
Alen Robertson right there over my shoulder um but I want to do another question and answer video this week and uh specifically it’s a question that I get a lot uh from new collectors who find clubs in the wild and uh it is what is the metal shaft cap that they’re
Finding and how can they find more of them so that they can put them on more clubs um it’s an obvious question because you know you come across these clubs and you see this metal shaft cap and you wonder why don’t all the clubs have this because it seems like a pretty
Cool decorative piece uh that must be indicative of a nicer Club club and what I end up explaining to them is that it’s the opposite it’s actually indicative of the cheapest kind of Club you could have found back in the day uh these caps are often found on economy Line clubs that
Were sold in retail stores and so when you find them as a collector and as a player uh you start to learn that uh they were basically characteristics of the cheapest clubs that were sold at the time um what that means is that the materials used in the club are often the
Lowest grade that a club maker would have or a company would have used for a club so the leather Shaft or I’m sorry the leather grip is often very thin um sometimes it’s even like paper so when you scrape it off or try to unwrap it it
Just falls apart into pieces uh and often the wood used the hickory wood for the shaft wasn’t quite the the quality that you would have found in a nicer club and um the way to figure that out would be to count the Grain Lines uh
Which most of the of the time when you come across these clubs with the shaft caps they obscure the the end of the grain so you can’t actually see how many lines are in it uh and uh we’ll talk a little bit more about the quality of the
Shafts uh underneath those caps in a second but um yeah the what the companies would do is you know kind of decorate it um a little bit nicer than the better quality clubs you would have found from your your local Club Pro and uh tried to make it look a little bit
Nicer than it was to entice people to buy them um what you’ll often see on the clubs that have these shafts are heads that have chromium finishes so they’re shiny uh they might have fancy names on them like Wentworth and and other things like that just to try to Market them to
Be a little bit you know to look nicer than they actually were um so from a Collectibles perspective you know they made a ton of these clubs in general and they made a lot of economy Line clubs and so there’s not a lot of collec value
To the to the clubs but um the from a playability perspective some of them actually are decent players or at least have good enough swing weight uh to Warrant building a beginner set around so when people find these clubs um you know one of the things that they want to
Do is try to you know put together a set and you know the other aspect of these metal capped clubs is that they are often sold as part of matched sets so we understand as as colle and players of Hickory golf clubs that when you start talking or seeing clubs that say matched
On them or have the yardages on them uh that they were meant for or even numbers um those are all indicative of late Hickory era clubs so we’re talking about clubs that were made in the late 1920s early 1930s and um generally speaking when you f when you come across the clubs with
All those terms like matched chromium uh some weird name there there isn’t like maybe a company name but just a like Argyle or you know just a whole bunch of different names uh and then you see the shaft cap uh you’re looking at what a club that would have been sold in
A retail setting uh not one that you would have gotten from your pro at the golf course um so there’s still totally playable you know you can still do all the same work on them uh it is a little trickier removing this cap and that gets
Us to the question which is how do I find those caps to replace them on CL on or shafts that they don’t have they’re not on uh which is a mouthful that I can’t say apparently um my answer to that question is they’re pretty much near impossible to remove without
Destroying um basically the way to get these off they’re so tight is that you have to kind of find a little Gap and then I use a flathead screwdriver and just start prying the metal off it’s made out of a thin aluminum so once you get underneath it and start turning the
Screwdriver you can actually peel it up pretty quick and pretty easy uh they don’t really serve much of a functional purpose at least the cheapest ones you find um this one that I have right here is purely decorative um I suppose there might have been some functionality for certain players to
Have the uh you know their their grip close to it so it kind of gave them something to stop against um so I suppose that’s a functional aspect but they didn’t do anything to keep the grip on most of the time when I take these
Off there’s still a nail that or a tack that’s securing the grip to the shaft so it’s not like I see this used to keep the grip on at least not in this case with this one that doesn’t have uh any you know that that’s basically just the
Cap um so yeah you take this off uh and once you do that it’s pretty much destroyed you’ve peeled it up and and you can’t put that back on another club so I don’t I never find them outside or loose of a shaft and uh capable of
Putting back on uh and even if you did did I’m not quite sure how you would get it on without destroying it you know because you’d have to try to stretch it a little bit to get it over the grip and um usually what ends up happening is
When I come across these kinds of shafts uh I want to remove the grip anyway and replace the grip because it’s it’s usually one of these paper thin leather cheap leather grips and once you get up to the the the the cap you pretty much
Have to just pry that off and then you know the the cap is toast uh one exception to that is this particular one which again this is probably a lower grade club that would have been sold in a retail setting however it’s a little bit nicer um of a
Cap and uh I think this is probably like a mid-grade and in fact this particular cap has a patent date on it so I think that the purpose of this there actually was a functional purpose to this particular cap uh you can see that there’s a tack that goes through the
Metal and it and uh then the the grain is actually exposed Ed at the top of the cap so I think this was probably made in an effort to um you know to put the cap on there actually to functionally keep the grip in place as well uh and then
Also show the the grain of the club so that a player a better player would pick this up off a shelf and be able to see the grain of the shaft to determine if it was a decent quality shaft and it is a better quality shaft it’s stiff and um
Yeah the other thing about these is is that because they’re coming from the late Hickory era um you know relatively speaking they’re they’re not that old or you know they’re the youngest kind of Hickory clubs you’re going to come across so the the wood is still in
Pretty good shape for the most part unless it’s been just stored in horrendous conditions um so I use these shafts all the time um you know there there are certain instances where you’ll come across especially clubs that have this fully enclosed cap and when you take that cap off you’ll see that
There’s maybe only four or five uh growth rings in the end grain uh which is an indicator of a a fairly young hickory wood uh and and not as strong as as you would normally want in a golf shaft you usually want the more lines that you see in the end grain the
The higher quality or the older it is and and the stronger it is um so that goes back to what I said earlier which is that you know these clubs were meant for retail settings and so the materials they were using on them were uh the cheapest they had
And uh they were trying to make you know the most money off of these as they could so you’re not going to find Stellar quality materials in these but you’ll still find completely playable clubs and um if you just do the work to to get them back into playing shape
They’ll be fine beginners clubs for you though I will say uh like any golf club even the ones today if you go to Walmart and you buy a set of irons and you compare those to the newest you know set from tidalist or Callaway or tailor made
You’re going to notice a difference in playability and feel and that’s kind of the same with the clubs that you find attached to these shafts is um you know they’re they’re perfectly suitable for for getting around the course but you’re going to find a better experience in
Some of the better quality heads uh that were made and um definitely you know find better quality shafts and and the feel from a better quality shaft versus this which is essentially kind of a a mop stick or a broomstick attached to a club head so I you know it sounds like
I’m being overly disparaging about these clubs I just want to emphasize that most of the time when you find these metal shaft or metal shaft caps you’re looking at the cheapest club that that particular Club maker was making uh in the late Hickory era and um yeah most
Collectors don’t want to see this cap uh well I shouldn’t say that you know I think there are collectors out there who kind of like the challenge of putting together these match sets of retail line and economy Line clubs and uh in those instances you want to try to find them
As complete and original as possible so you want to see that cap uh which also you know alludes to the question that people have you know when they’re putting together their first set and they see some of their clubs have this this cap and some of them don’t they
Assume that they need to find shafts that have these Caps or at least the cap themselves so they can put them on their shafts um so i’ I sort of already answered that it’s it’s pretty much impossible to take this cap off and put it on another shaft without damaging it
But what I will say is if your intent is to try to build match set of of clubs that you know have a uniform appearance and um you want to have the cap on all of them then the best bet is to collect these shafts from other heads heads that
You don’t want and then just reshaft them on the heads that you do want uh you know there’s collectors of everything and and um you know you can get pretty particular in how you collect these clubs and so that would be my recommendation if um you just want them
To look at and you want to put them on display uh and you want them to to be you know want them to look all the same then that would be how you’d go about doing that um but trying to remove them and put them on another shaft is pretty
Much impossible and like I said I never find them uh apart from a shaft in a condition that you’d be able to put them on and even if you did you’d probably damage it getting it back on a different shaft um now there are exceptions to everything and what you’re going to find
As you start collecting more clubs is that uh not all of them were the cheapest uh not all the clubs you find with these caps were the cheapest of that particular maker uh Grand Slam which was the top-of thee Line Club for Hillary K bradby in the 1920s had a very
Ornate shaft cap that had the um the logo for the Grand Slam on it and uh just really cool intricate I think it was made out of brass I’ve had those clubs before I don’t have any right now to show you um but that is just a way uh
Just just to tell you that um sometimes shaft caps uh were actually put on better quality clubs um and so the Grand Slam is an example of that I’ve actually collected over the years some other different kinds of shaft caps that are different than this standard aluminum
Cap uh Great Lakes made one that was basically like a large push pin and that one uh just hammered into the butt end of the shaft and served the same kind of purpose as these do but it was a little bit different and had the Great Lakes
Name on it um I found McGregor ones that have a screw hole in the middle of it and those just screw into the butt end of the shaft uh you’ll also find then instances of uh caps that you know looked a little bit nicer than just this
Normal one that has nothing written on it uh Draper mayard out of um New Hampshire put all their information on the uh the cap of of their clubs so there were ways to kind of make these look a little bit nicer and there were some companies that used them on uh
Better quality clubs uh but generally speaking when you come across these metal shaft caps you’re looking at the lowest uh grade Club of a particular maker and um you know doesn’t mean you can’t play the club uh but that is uh you if if you thought that you were
Finding something that was a little bit rare or more interesting uh you fell into the marketing trap of these companies that they were using back in the day to try to entice people to think that they were buying something a little bit nicer than they were now that is my
Experience with these if anybody watches this video and has more information about these Caps or has some examples of other higher quality clubs with these caps I’d love to see them um you know this is what I have in my particular collection and um there there’s always more information out there to glean
About this stuff uh so what I’m telling you is not the full story most likely there’s probably other companies that have used these caps in the past uh and there may be different stories or reasons for for why they did that uh than what I described to you today but I
Think uh generally speaking the Caps that you come across are going to fit the narrative that I just laid out for you and um yeah like I said if you have any other questions about this feel free to reach out and um uh I’ll entertain any other questions you have about
Hickory clubs and uh I’ll do a video on it if I get that question enough thanks for watching folks we’ll see you next time take Care
