Barney Adams Returns to the Fray with Breakthrough Golf Technologies

The golf club innovator is back with a new company that just released its first product – a putter shaft that Adams insists will help you become a better putter. Introducing Breakthrough Golf Technologies.

The golf club innovator is back with a new company that just released its first product – a putter shaft that Adams insists will help you become a better putter.

By Tony Dear


Barney Adams

I’m guessing you, me, every golfer we know, and, indeed, every golfer we don’t know, has given precisely zero thought to the shaft in their putter. We’ve probably spent plenty of time thinking about and researching what shafts to put in our driver, fairway woods, irons, even our wedges. But, despite the fact many golfers seem happy paying upwards of $500 for a putter, they’ve probably never considered the shaft.

Why would they? The putterhead moves at about two mph, so does it really matter what the shaft is made of, and do its design characteristics have any influence over the success of a putt?

Barney Adams certainly thinks so. You remember Barney Adams – he founded Adams Golf in 1988 and hit the jackpot eight years later with his Tight Lies fairway wood which he marketed on a Golf Channel informercial.

Tight Lies sales slowed as the first decade of the 21st century came to an end, eventually forcing Adams to sell his company to TaylorMade in June 2012. The irrepressible Adams couldn’t stay out of the golf industry for long, however. In January 2015, he filed a new company called Breakthrough Golf Technologies (BGT) in Richardson, TX and, after three years of R&D, it recently introduced its first product – a putter shaft which Adams insists represents the first meaningful innovation in that product category in several decades.

BGT says the new no-taper Stability Shaft cuts torque by up to 50%. You’re probably thinking putter shafts don’t have torque, and you’d be right, they don’t – not much anyway. As putterheads have gotten significantly heavier in recent years, however, so the torque in the typical putter shaft has increased a notch or two, meaning your putterface may not be consistently square to the target line at impact. That has left the door open for a savvy marketer and visionary like Barney Adams to create something that minimizes the problem.

The Stability Shaft features eight layers of wrapped-and-layered high modulus carbon fiber to lower the torque. A 22g aluminum is precisely located, says Adams, to reinforce flexural rigidity. A 7075-aluminum connector helps to stiffen and reinforce, while the stainless-steel tips have extremely consistent wall thicknesses for superior strength and are coated with a smoke PVD finish to add protection from corrosion and rusting.

Stability Shaft is compatible with any putterhead design and will not alter the weight of your putter though its swingweight may increase slightly. The shaft can be attached, says Adams, to virtually any tip diameter of any putter, regardless of the bend profile. It is roughly 25% stiffer than most other putter shafts.

Breakthrough Golf Technology isn’t actually the first company this century to experiment with putter shafts as UST Mamiya introduced its Frequency Filtered shaft in 2005. Though certainly stiffer than other putter shafts, it differed from Stability slightly by allowing certain vibration frequencies to pass through to the player’s hands in order to give him better feedback on where he was striking the ball on the putterface.

Despite a successful introduction when it recorded numerous top-ten finishes on the PGA Tour, including Wes Short Jr’s only Tour victory at the Michelin Championship in Las Vegas, the Frequency Filtered shaft never really took off. Adams will likely do a better job of letting the golfing public know how much it needs the new Stability Shaft whose efficacy was tested using state-of-the-art high-speed cameras, robots, SAM Putt Lab, Quintic Ball Roll software, and Trackman4.

The Breakthrough Golf Technologies Stability putter shaft weighs 125 grams and is available in four tip sizes including a double-bend option in an X-stiff flex.

Breakthrough Golf Technologies Putter Shaft

$200
breakthroughgolftech.com


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