Restoring Irons – 8: Lie Adjustments

In the last installment of this series on restoring irons I wrote about regripping clubs. When you’re done with that you may want to change the loft and/or lie of your irons.

Vintage irons usually have weaker loft compared to modern irons, so you may want to bend those a bit stronger. The lie angle, which is the angle between the shaft and the leading edge of the club head, may need to be changed as well depending on how flat or upright you want to swing the club. Forged irons can be bent more easily than cast irons. With cast irons the risk of breaking the hosel is far bigger and you probably will only be able to bend them 2 or 3 degrees tops.

In this post I will describe the process of bending the lie angles of my Hogan irons. I bent these clubs 7 degrees flat and I did it using a bending bar, a vice and protractor. Normally you would use a professional Loft and Lie machine for this purpose but since I don’t own one I decided to be creative. Using a dedicated machine is much easier and faster than securing the head in a vice, but if you are on a budget you can get similar results using my method.

 

Left to right: A professional loft and lie machine and a bending bar. (Golfsmith)

If you have a workbench with a vice then that’s great. I don’t have a workbench in my apartment so I opted to bolt the vice onto some pieces of wood.

 

Securing the heads

Securing the head in the vice is the tricky part. As you can see, I used 2 small metal plates to protect the club from damage. You need to find a way to secure it so that it won't move while bending. The best way is to start by clamping the top line and the leading edge in the vice and try to bend the hosel. If the head starts to twist in the vice it means that you didn't secure it in a way that resists the forces of the bending operation.

 

Bending the hosels

Don’t try to bend the clubs in one go, make multiple smaller bends until you feel that you’ve got it right. After that you probably need to measure and check the new lie angle. You can do this by setting the club with the leading edge flush to the ground and measuring the angle between the shaft and the floor with the protractor.

 

If you have the head secured It's also important to position the bending bar as low as possible (where the hosel meets the head) and bend it at that position. If you bend to far up the hosel you may run into problems later if you need to remove or replace shafts…