The Precision Rifle Project X has been with us for a very long time. It somehow got missed when I was in the early days of measuring the vast number of shafts in the market. I noticed its absence when I measured the Project X LZ model. It was originally made by Royal Precision Shaft Company in Connecticut. They were acquired by TrueTemper and the production was moved to Tennessee. You will see many of the best players in the world playing this shaft. Compared to a Dynamic Gold X100, it is slightly softer in the butt and stiffer in the Mid. Unlike the TrueTemper Dynamic Gold, the Project X profile is the same for all weight/stiffness variations. The heavier the shaft the stiffer it gets. The profile remains the same for all flex designations.
This video was sent to me years ago by Dave Eagar, who mentored me when I first began measuring golf shafts. It is a brief history of the Royal Precision Shaft Company and a tour through the Royal Precision facility and manufacturing process. It is presented by Ron Chalmers, then President of Royal Precision with Dave Makarucha of Accra Golf Shafts as camera man. ACCRA was recently acquired by True Sports, parent company of True Temper.
Lets look at the profile:
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My friend and mentor, Dave Tutelman posted this comment in another discussion of the shaft stiffness range metric. I cannot express my thoughts about this new metric any better than he did. “A big advantage of “measuring” shaft stiffness by plotting the EI curve is that you can do mathematical operations like this. You chose a simple one, with simple arithmetic. But it isn’t that hard to use a butt-biased weighting function that will predict frequency, or a tip-biased weighting function to predict trajectory height. The combination of a known EI profile and spreadsheet capabilities means it’s just arithmetic. As we understand shafts better, EI will not become obsolete; just the way we use and display it will.”
True Temper introduced the term “Loading Zone” with the Project X Loading Zone driver shaft a few years ago. I was skeptical at first, having seen other shafts with severe approaches to mid shaft stiffness that did not work for many of my clients. I put a Project X Loading Zone shaft in my own driver and it stayed there for several months. It comes back when I finish play testing a new design. It loads effortlessly and gives my unfixable negative angle of attack the launch I need to buy some distance. I was anxious to see how this approach would be implemented in an iron shaft.
The Project X Loading Zone irons shaft has a rapid loss of stiffness in the mid zone of the shaft. It then runs out in a long stable tip. We have seen some very successful implementations of this design over the last few years. Each with its own particular flavor. But overall in my fitting experience a very playable shaft for a wide range of golfers. This design is easy to load, creates a moderately higher flight but remains workable for the highly skilled golfer. I have seen this design add distance without adding dispersion. As of this writing, the Project X LZ has won 3 PGA events and is being played by close to 20 players between the PGA and Web tours.
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Our player/coach/fitter partner has put these into his gamers for several weeks now. He replaced his Dynamic Gold Tour X100’s with the Project X LZ 6.5. His driver swing speed averages 117. He reports that he loves the feel of the shaft through impact. He gets a little lower flight and a lot more control. His ability to work the ball is improved. His dispersion is tighter. He reports he can trust the shaft to deliver the head consistently to shape his ball flight.
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The Project X HZRDUS Yellow is the third driver shaft in the Hand Crafted family from True Temper. It has a notably soft midsection. This is much like the first in the series, the Project X Loading Zone reviewed earlier. The bend profile is much like the profiles of the 70 gram versions of the Project X Loading Zone model. The soft zones of those shafts moved with weight and flex. I have fit a number of players into the 50 and 60 gram versions of the Loading Zone. Therefore, another shaft with that design grabbed my attention.
I had a chance just recently to test it during a fitting with a single digit handicap player that showed up with a 6 year old driver and a 103 mph golf swing. Working with the Yellow HZRDUS and a TaylorMade M1 we added 2 mph to his swing speed, 3 mph to his ball speed, dropped his spin 800 rpm all of which added 17 yards to his drives. His playing buddies are in for a surprise.
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The Project X brand is a flagship in the golf shaft business. The brand started as an unstepped steel shaft and has morphed into carbon fiber driver and hybrid shafts. This shaft, like the Project X loading zone that came before it is hand made in the US under tight quality control processes.
The product information from True Temper tells us the shaft has a firmer midsection than the Loading Zone model. And indeed it does, lets look at the numbers:
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The Project X LZ, or loading zone shaft features a linear soft zone in the middle of the shaft which is visibly reinforced with bias wraps to maintain torsional stability. This 2014 composite driver shaft from True Temper, released under the Project X brand, is made in limited numbers in the USA facility in San Diego California. I am told only 60 or 70 can be made in any given day with current staffing.
This is an interesting option now being offered by a few companies. The general golfing public has access to the shafts that are made in the tour department for the tour players. Most graphite shafts are hand rolled. As such, the care taken by the person putting the shaft together is reflected in the quality and consistency of the finished shaft. Almost every company has some highly skilled wrappers that make their prototypes. And very often, when these people are not making protos, they are making the shafts that go to the professional tour vans. These shafts are not necessarily better than the shafts made in the volume production shops, but they are free of the shaft to shaft inconsistencies found in the factory produced product. And I have seen some inconsistencies that are hard to believe from the high volume, low cost foundries, but that is another story.
The concept of the Load Zone was to create a soft midsection in the shaft. Mid soft shafts are among the most popular shaft in my fitting experience. No shaft company likes to hear a section of their shafts being discussed as soft. If you make the tip stiff and the butt stiff, the mid is soft in relation to those other two zones. In the Project X Loading Zone shaft, the soft mid section is reinforced by a material called flex lock. That is graphite fiber oriented on an angle from the length of the shaft, commonly refereed to as bias or hoop plies. This stabilizes the torque in this zone. A full discussion of the design is shown in the videoed discussion I had with Don Brown, the True Temper graphite shaft product development manager.
The technical discussion and measurements are available only to registered readers
This is an interview shot at the 2015 PGA merchandise show in Orlando. Don Brown is the Graphite Shaft Product Development Manger for True Temper Sports. The discussion of the Loading Zone Shafts gets technical. Many readers of this site tell me they do not understand some of the graphics and discussions in my reviews. What you see in this video is a discussion using the terms you see on this shaft review site. Enjoy!
The technical discussion and measurements are available only to registered readers
Whenever someone asks me what is the best shaft, the answer is always the same, ‘the one that fits your swing.’ This one fits the swing change I am working on. The other shaft fit the swing I had. So I will leave you with this thought. There is a synergy between your gear and your swing. If your swing is grooved on a particular shaft loading pattern, that shaft may not best fit a swing change you are trying to make. In fact, it may impede you from being successful with a new motion pattern.
True Temper introduced the term “Loading Zone” with the 
