Are drivers still vanity lofted in 2024???

[erock9174]

In the Ping G430 10K thead the topic of vanity lofting came up after a post @Karl made which was responded to by @Jman . I know this was a trend in the past when drivers were bonded and launch monitors were not as common as they are today. Which to me made sense as most people tried drivers at demo days where you could see actual ball flight and well lets face it, most people probably play too little loft in their driver. So for an oem to slap a 9* stamp on an 11* driver probably helped more people than it hurt.
This discussion piqued my curiosity and wondered if vanity lofting still existed.

I did some digging on the interwebs and found some driver specs vs actual measured lofts on a site that does this every other year. I took their results from 2019, 2021 and 2023 and put them into a spreadsheet. Took the delta between the stamped loft vs measured loft and then calculated the absolute value so I could sort the chart by the biggest delta.
Results are below. Seems to be that most oems do a really solid job of getting the loft right on heads these days.

Now granted, one could also argue that the oems are hand selecting the heads that are being sent in for testing too.

For the club builders or guys out there with access a loft machine, I'd be curious to see what you are seeing these days.

 

[noodle3872]

I think most OEM’s will be pretty close to the stamped loft. Manufacturing processes keep improving which reduces variances. These days it makes more sense (to me any how) for heads to have a bit more loft given how low some balls spin off driver.

 

[blugold]

Is this a reverse loft jacking thread?

 

[BigMac]

I'm not real sure how much difference 0.1 - 0.2 degrees of loft are going to make in real world results. I introduce a lot more variance than that with my swing.

 

[Louis_Posture]

I think most OEM’s will be pretty close to the stamped loft. Manufacturing processes keep improving which reduces variances. These days it makes more sense (to me any how) for heads to have a bit more loft given how low some balls spin off driver.

Yes!

 

[wubears71]

 

[Karl]

It's interesting that some were significantly lower in stamped loft. I wonder if they are trying to make the head look more low spin than it is? I would like to see some off the shelf head lofts measured.