Nippon 1100 iron shafts

For this golf season, I've decided to build a new set of irons. I wanted to try something different for shafts so I talked to my good buddy who's an amazing clubmaker and he suggested I try to get my hands on some Nippons, which are known for their consistency and quality. I ended up grabbing these 4-pw pullout Nippon 1100 shafts off ebay for $78 shipped. They came out of some Callaway Diablo Forged irons and were not butt trimmed so they have lots of room to trim to various playing lengths. The butts of each shaft is marked with "S" and the length of the shaft as well as "Made in Japan" and a date of manufacture. They have Callaway shafts bands that say Uniflex.

Each shaft was 0.75" shorter than the stated measurement on the butt and they are constant weight... all of them were 108 grams (+/- 0.5). The balance point on all the shafts was also very close... 49.5% (+/- 0.5). The frequency slope on them is a little steep... roughly 7 cpm/club, assuming 7 gram head weight and 1/2" club length progression. This could be an artifact of the constant weight shaft and the stiffness between adjacent clubs won't be as severe as the freq meter suggests. Overall, very happy with the consistency of the shafts.

The heads I decided to go with are Infiniti 422's, which are from their 2006 line... 431 stainless steel mid-size cavity backs with constant low offset and a 4-way cambered sole. I built 5 to gap wedge so the shafts were soft stepped. I tried to adjust everything to make the set as consistent as possible... spine check, flo check, freq check, loft and lie adjustment, progressive swingweight. I think it's kind of silly for Callaway to call them uniflex, the butt says stiff and they frequency to a typical regular. In any case, they feel fine to me... getting my typical 150 yards out of a 7 iron.