Wow, I go away for a few months and this forum goes seriously downhill. What happened? Lia used to post some good stuff but, well, not now I guess. Shame.
Well anyhoo, I might be qualified to take a stab at your clamped grip question. So basically, as everyone has said, it makes no difference to impact at all. Let me explain why. And apologies if I'm dumbing this down too much, but I want it to make sense to people who don't have any engineering qualifications.
Basically, when you're talking about impact, forces applied in one place don't instantaneously appear somewhere else, they move around in waves (stress waves really). And the speed they move at depends on the material that they are in (and depending in how the load was applied, e.g. compressive/tensile waves move faster than shear waves).
For sake of argument, lets consider a steel shafted 5 iron, which is around 37 inches long, or 940mm for my European friends. Now shear waves in steel move at just over 3000m/s (around 7000mph!), so it would take just under 0.6 milliseconds for the wave to travel up the shaft, be reacted by the clamp and then back down to the clubhead, where it could have some effect on the ball. Problem is, an impact is only 0.4ms, so the ball is long gone by then. Plus, once its reached full compression, its got most of its energy from the clubhead, so you've really only got around 0.2 milliseconds to play with.
So as Mandarin showed previously, for the impact duration you can just consider the problem using conservation of momentum (including COR as its not an elastic collision).
Oh, and to answer your inertia question, clamping does nothing to the clubhead's inertia during impact. It does of course affect the club overall, but there is no effect on the ball. It just stops the club flying across your yard/laboratory.
Well anyhoo, I might be qualified to take a stab at your clamped grip question. So basically, as everyone has said, it makes no difference to impact at all. Let me explain why. And apologies if I'm dumbing this down too much, but I want it to make sense to people who don't have any engineering qualifications.
Basically, when you're talking about impact, forces applied in one place don't instantaneously appear somewhere else, they move around in waves (stress waves really). And the speed they move at depends on the material that they are in (and depending in how the load was applied, e.g. compressive/tensile waves move faster than shear waves).
For sake of argument, lets consider a steel shafted 5 iron, which is around 37 inches long, or 940mm for my European friends. Now shear waves in steel move at just over 3000m/s (around 7000mph!), so it would take just under 0.6 milliseconds for the wave to travel up the shaft, be reacted by the clamp and then back down to the clubhead, where it could have some effect on the ball. Problem is, an impact is only 0.4ms, so the ball is long gone by then. Plus, once its reached full compression, its got most of its energy from the clubhead, so you've really only got around 0.2 milliseconds to play with.
So as Mandarin showed previously, for the impact duration you can just consider the problem using conservation of momentum (including COR as its not an elastic collision).
Oh, and to answer your inertia question, clamping does nothing to the clubhead's inertia during impact. It does of course affect the club overall, but there is no effect on the ball. It just stops the club flying across your yard/laboratory.
