Four People, One Bench
Everyone here fits and everyone here builds. Nobody hands your session to somebody else once the measuring is done, and the person who wrote your spec sheet is generally the person who cuts the shaft.
Ruben Tavares
Owner · Build BenchRuben opened the shop as a repair bench and never entirely left it. He bought the frequency analyser that changed the direction of the business, and he still does most of the iron set rebuilds himself because he does not trust anyone else to be patient enough with a slope that will not come straight.
Before this he spent eleven years as an assembly technician for a component distributor, which is where he learned that epoxy mixed by eye is a warranty claim waiting to happen.
Marisol Kearney
Lead Fitter · Long ClubsMarisol runs most of the driver and fairway wood work. She came to fitting sideways, through eight seasons of teaching, and she is unusually good at spotting when a player's problem is a delivery issue that no shaft on the rack will solve.
She is also the reason this shop starts long-club sessions on turf rather than off a tee, an argument she won in about 2014 and has never had to revisit.
Desmond Ayala
Fitter · Short GameDesmond handles wedge and putter sessions and does the bulk of the loft and lie work. He grew up caddying at a course with clay under thin bermuda, which is why he takes bounce selection more seriously than almost anyone and why he insists on testing off three surfaces before signing off on a wedge.
He keeps the sand in the short-game bay at a deliberately awkward moisture level, on the grounds that fitting a bunker club out of perfect sand is a waste of everyone's morning.
Hollis Nakamura
Build Technician · SchedulingHollis assembles most of what leaves the building and keeps the spec sheet archive, which now runs to several thousand files and gets pulled from more often than anyone expected. If you call about a build from four years ago, she is the one who will find it in about thirty seconds.
She introduced the overnight vertical cure rack and the rule that no club leaves without a second frequency reading, both of which quietly eliminated most of the shop's rework.
Nobody Is on Commission
There is no bonus attached to a build here, no target for anyone to hit, and no incentive to recommend a purchase over an adjustment. That is a deliberate structure, because commission quietly bends recommendations even among people who genuinely mean well.
It also means that when a fitter tells you your current driver is fine, you can take it at face value. It cost them nothing to say it.
- The fitter who takes your measurements writes your spec sheet
- Builds are assembled in house, usually by Hollis, always verified before collection
- Iron set rebuilds go to Ruben regardless of who ran the session
- Every spec sheet is filed and retrievable by name for as long as the shop exists
- Follow-up calls come from the person you worked with, not from a call sheet
Where the Knowledge Comes From
Component Manufacturer Schools
Shaft and head manufacturers run technical programmes for build shops covering trim charts, adapter tolerances and assembly standards. Everyone on the bench has been through several, and the trim chart material in particular is not available any other way.
Volume, Honestly
The single biggest source of what this crew knows is having measured several thousand clubs that arrived in customers' bags. Nothing teaches you what factory tolerance actually looks like faster than reading a few hundred sets that nobody ever checked.
Being Wrong in Public
Follow-up calls exist partly to catch our own errors. When a build does not do what the session predicted, that gets discussed at the bench rather than filed quietly. A surprising amount of what we know arrived that way.