We started because a spreadsheet did not match a golf course.
Impact Fit Lab has occupied the same unit on Zionsville Road since 2016. Two bays, five people, and a standing rule that no recommendation leaves the building without the conditions attached.
The winter that produced a bad set of irons
Bennett Kolar spent eleven winters selling and building clubs for a retail chain before opening this lab. The story he tells new hires is about a customer in February who was fitted into a stiff shaft on a set of forged irons, in a warm indoor bay, off a thick mat, hitting range balls that had spent the winter in a wire basket.
Every one of those four factors pushed the same direction. The mat forgave a strike two grooves low. The warm air added speed. The tired ball under-read spin. The room removed wind. In April, on wet Indiana turf at 51 degrees, the golfer could not get the ball to stop on a green and had to be re-shafted at his own expense.
Nothing in that session was fraudulent. Everything in it was unrecorded. Nobody could reconstruct why the recommendation had been wrong, because nobody had written down what the recommendation had been made inside of.
That is the entire premise of this business. Not better machines — the machines are good and getting better. Better bookkeeping around the machines.
Five commitments, in writing, since the first year
These are posted on the wall by the bench and printed on the back of every condition sheet. If we break one, you have grounds to say so.
01 — Conditions travel with numbers
No carry, spin, or speed figure leaves this building alone. Air temperature, pressure, ball model, surface, and capture method go on the same page.
02 — The discard rule is visible
We say up front which strikes get thrown out and why, and the sheet reports how many were discarded. A hidden filter can manufacture any conclusion you like.
03 — One variable at a time
Head, then shaft, then length, then lie. Changing two things and observing an improvement tells you nothing about which thing caused it.
04 — The spec is yours
Written, printed, and handed over regardless of whether you order a build. It contains everything a third-party builder needs.
05 — "No change needed" is a valid result
If your gear already fits, we will tell you and charge only the session fee. We would rather have that conversation than sell a marginal upgrade.
Where the rules came from
Three of the five were written after we got something wrong and a customer told us about it. The notebook entries that explain the reasoning are linked from the Lab Notebook.
An unglamorous unit in a light-industrial park, on purpose
We are not in a retail plaza and we do not have a putting green in a shop window. What the unit does have is fourteen and a half feet of ceiling, a concrete slab that does not flex, and enough depth behind the hitting position that a doppler unit gets a real look at the ball rather than a truncated one.
The build room sits behind the bays rather than in a separate facility, which means a shaft can be pulled, tipped, and re-installed while you wait and then tested again in the same session under the same logged conditions. Sending work out would break that chain, and a broken chain is exactly what we set out to fix.
Parking is directly outside the door. There is no showroom to walk through and nobody will try to sell you a glove on the way out.
Mostly people who have been fitted before and were not satisfied
Our typical booking is not a beginner. It is a golfer with a handicap between 4 and 18 who owns decent equipment, has sat through at least one fitting somewhere else, and cannot explain why the result did not hold up on the course.