Restoring Irons – 4: Head preparation

Assumptions

You have sufficiently abraded the shaft tips.

Cleaning

You should clean the inside of the hosel with sanding paper. Wrap a piece of paper around a screwdriver or something else that fits easily into the hosel and make both back and forth and rotary movements. You want to do this to get rid of any epoxy residue before trying to fit the shaft. Take a good look inside the hosel to see if there are any irregularities that may prevent the shaft from sliding in. Blow out any remaining dust and gently try to insert the new shaft into the hosel. Depending on how far you can push or screw the shaft in you may want to try to use a bit more force to see if that helps. The fit is meant to be very tight so don't expect it to slide in without any effort! In case you trimmed the tip you probably won't be able to push the shaft all the way down.

Note

Should the shaft get stuck in the hosel during fitting then you can get it loose by securing the head in a vice and turn it loose. If you can't get a grip on the shafts with bare hands, try putting on plastic gloves (the ones you used to do the dishes with...) and give it another go.

Boring out the hosel

If you feel the shaft is not going to fit, not even by applying a moderate amount of force, you know it's time to bore out the hosel. There are a couple of ways to do this:

• Use a reamer. This is probably the safest option but since we are only taking away a small amount of steel it may be overkill.
  
• Use sanding paper, spiraled around a drill bit. There are specialized drill bits available for this purpose but a normal bit may work as well.
  
• Use a metal drill bit that is the exact diameter of the wanted size. The danger with this approach is that you can drill out too much if your aim is slightly off. If you go this route you should definitely use a drill press and some sort of vice to hold the head in place.
  
• It's probably safer to start out with a slightly smaller drill bit to see if you can get there by hand drilling using an up and down motion while turning the head by hand. This worked for me.

In the end you'll probably end up using a combination of sanding paper and hand drilling. Remember to recheck the fit after each turn.

In the next installment we'll be discussing ferrules.