This is an addendum to the ‘restoring irons’ series I did last year. Separating the head from the shaft can be a difficult task, and some of the older sets need a different treatment than the one described here.
While reshafting a set of Ben Hogan 1953 Precisions I found that the conventional way of removing the shafts did not work as expected. I had removed the shaft pins and torched the hosel until it was red hot. The head would not move at all. If this happens it means that the epoxy is not the reason that the head does not come loose. I could think of only two possible reasons.
The first assertion is that corrosion has formed a bond between the shaft and the head; not implausible after 58 years of use.
The second assertion is that the shafts have been hammered into a very tight hosel, thus forming a mechanical bond that simply can’t be broken by heat.
Either way, I knew I needed to resort to a different way of getting the shafts out of the clubheads. What I did was this:
- Cut the shaft an inch above the ferrule.
- Insert a solid metal rod into the shaft. The tighter it fits the better it will work.
- Clamp the shaft (with the rod inside) in a vice and make sure that the shaft can’t twist.
- Grab the head with two hands and try to turn it loose.
- Once it gives in you can start to pull it off.
It turns out that the shaft tips weren’t abraded at all and that little or no epoxy had been used for these clubs. Epoxies weren’t very strong those days so I figure they just made sure that they also secured them with pins and the mechanical bond by hammering the shafts into a tight hosel.
As described above, you must put a rod inside the shaft before clamping it in a vice. If the rod is too small in diameter the shaft can break due to the twisting of the head.
This happened to me but fortunately I managed to fix it by removing the ferrule and repeating the process with a better fitting rod. (see below pics)…
