Movable weights in drivers come in a variety of flavors

Movable weight technology is all the rage in equipment today. This trend is huge in drivers, obviously, but even extends to putters.

In case you’ve been living in a cave or in the desolate confines of Lanny Wadkins’s vocabulary, the point behind movable weights is to alleviate slices and hooks via the weighting scheme. A heavier heel than toe will promote a closed face at impact, biasing ball flight toward a draw (or at least less of a slice). A heavier toe than heel will bias toward a fade.

And again, for you cave/Lanny’s head-dwellers (how did you get Internet access, anyway?), Phil Mickelson carried two drivers in route to his second Masters victory this year. One was a Callaway Fusion FT-3 with a fade bias, the other was a FT-3 with a neutral bias (because Phil’s natural shot is a draw).

But from company to company, the philosophy of the movable weight differs. The FT-3 has internal weighting—not actually movable at all except by the engineers putting the club together. TaylorMade, of course, has created several drivers with honest-to-god movable weights, including the r5 and wildly popular r7 lines. Other companies, including Adams, have jumped on the weight bandwagon, too.

Now add to the mix KZG, the family-owned favorite of many club-fitters around the country. The new KZG GF 4 is a 425cc titanium driver with four weight ports. The movable weight screws come in 1.5, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, and 12-gram weights, giving the GF 4 a total of 2401 different weighting options, according to a KZG press release.

The interesting part is that unlike Adams or TaylorMade, KZG doesn’t provide a wrench for moving the weights. According to Jonathan Abrahams of KZG, the reason is that “the whole idea behind [the GF 4] is to leave the adjustments in the hands of the clubfitting professional.”

The philosophy of KZG, then, is somewhere between Callaway and TaylorMade: flexibility without complete control. And perhaps this is a good thing, because if you are prone to tinkering, you could drive yourself battier than one of John Daly’s ex-wives trying to find just the right combination for your swing.

Time will tell how much movable weights help the average golfer. It would probably help our games more dramatically to be able to redistribute some of our own body weight, but that, of course, requires considerably more effort.