Can I put my old driver shaft in my new driver? Yes, but ...

Question: Do shafts wear out or could you keep putting your old shaft into newer heads?

Answer: We think you are perfectly fine to put your current driver shaft in your new driver, provided you start with a high-quality part and finish with a club fitting from a high-quality fitter. In other words, if we’re talking about the best aftermarket shafts from top-level companies, and of course, if you’re switching out to a new driver featuring the same hosel adapter, while being dialed in for the same head weight and same shaft length as you have on your current setup, then sticking with a proven entity makes sense to us.

But here’s the thing: We don’t think you should.

While tour players have been known to trade out an old head and insert a new model in a proven shaft several times over, your situation most likely is going to be different. (Yes, we realize new custom driver shafts can be pricey, and the very good one you think you have might make for a thriftier alternative. But bear with us.)

First, durability should not be an issue, especially since you’ll just be trading shafts without having to really do a full install. Unless you’ve been dragging your unattached driver shaft behind your car on the way home from the course, tip down, or you swing at 120 mpg while using a 40-gram L-flex shaft, or you routinely hit the ground before the ball when taking driver swings, you and your body will wear out before the shaft will. The USGA robot can make housands of hits at 120 mph and faster in testing golf balls without having to worry about shaft breakage, lthough if those impacts stray farther off-center that starts to put a strain on a shaft. (But, of course, you are not swinging at 120 mph.)

At the manufacturer level, there simply is a monumental amount of testing to get the shaft right on the performance side as much as the durability sid, said John Oldenburg, one of the game's foremost authorities on shaft design for over a quarter century and currently director of shaft development for Ping. "Some companies test using air cannons, firing golf balls at excessive speeds at the face of assembled clubs, while others use different mechanical tests that may involve statically loading a shaft to measure how much force is required to cause a failure, or loading the shaft repeatedly at a lower load threshold to see how many cycles the shaft can survive before failure," he said. "At Ping, we currently use our Pingman robot to test durability. Shafts, particularly graphite, are much, much more durable today. Better materials, better designs, better manufacturing, and also better durability testing are all contributing to the increased durability that we see today."

That’s not to say a shaft can’t break (the airlines are particularly adept at pushing driver shafts beyond the breaking point, and, well, see Tyrell Hatton above, for example), and certainly a poor-quality shaft can give over time. There may be a noticeable wear marks or even a microscopic striation or crack, and you’ll likely hear it if you bend the shaft, but again only if the shaft has been unusually damaged.

Also, it's possible that the hosel adapter might develop a crack or a loose screw, especially if you frequently attach and detach the head—or smash it into the ground after your third straight tee ball into the jungle. If it's gotten bad enough, you could see those cracks at the tip, but this scenario is highly unusual.

Consider that the vast majority of name brand manufacturers run durability tests on shafts under thousands of hits at speeds that most average golfers don’t achieve—and we’re not talking about average recreational players, we’re talking about average tour players. Shaft breakage from repeated hits at average golfer speeds just isn’t a major concern, so re-using a favorite old shaft, provided the adapter is still intact and functioning, seems a reasonable option.

Moreover, assuming all the specs between old and new driver are the same, the head/shaft combination—both function and feel—should be similar to what you’ve always used. The downside, of course, is that you really limit that fitting to only one company’s drivers, not the most agnostic approach to the driver purchase because the best solutions may come in the form of manufacturers you might not have originally considered.

But tour players have done this for years. As an example, Jon Rahm used the same model shaft in every driver he played for a decade before switching to a different model this year. It matched the feel of his delivery mechanism in the swing for a long time, and then it didn’t. Of course, unlike Rahm, we’re guessing your driver upgrade is coming multiple years since your last driver fitting. And Rahm used the same model for years, not the same exact shaft. But it’s a mistake for an average golfer to assume that the shaft he or she’s been using for the last five years is the right shaft today.

But here’s what should be an obvious solution: Not only take your current driver and its shaft to your next clubfitting, but maybe pull out that shaft and see if it feels better, worse or just different with the latest round of drivers. Again, we would strongly counsel against pulling that shaft out of one manufacturers’ hosel adapter and epoxying it into a second manufacturers’ hosel adapter for a new driver. That would be like taking a set of steel shafts from an old set of irons and putting them in a new set of irons. It’s not that it can’t be done, it’s just that given today’s increasing level of manufacturing consistency, that kind of drastic step seems unnecessary.

So if you’ve got a shaft you like, the first thing to do is to figure out what you like most about it. That can reflect your impressions of overall distance, or control over ball flight, or even more consistency of impacts on the face. Does the old shaft on the new head produce any more reliable evidence of its superiority, or does a new shaft on the market get you all of what you had with a little more of what you didn’t think you could get?

The overriding truth is that the latest graphite shafts can give you everything you brought with you to the fitting from the beginning. And then they can add in a little more of what you didn’t know you could still get, like distance and consistency.

In short, we’re all for establishing a baseline or even a target set of performance numbers with your current shaft. But let a good fitter find that optimized combination that takes you from the player you were to one with new potential./ And the good answer is that the best fitter might be able to get you to that next level while making you feel like you haven’t given up your security blanket, or more precisely, maybe even found a new one.