I wanted to share some DIY Hacking I did this weekend to work on my putter face alignment using old home depot tool and some cheap amazon stuff for do-it-yourselfers. To preface, I bought a Blast Golf device a few weeks ago and noticed that my putting face angle was between 1.5 and 2 degrees open which might explain why I’ve been missing some putts lately. Also, I took a putting lesson a month or so ago and the teach pointed out that my start line alignment was off a couple of inches.
If you haven’t tried the Blast Motion product, it’s a great device for putting. It appears amazingly accurate and gives you a ton of info on your putting stroke including face angle, loft, tempo, and backwards and forwards face angle changes. It’s supposed to do full swings and chipping as well, but I’ve only used it in my downstairs indoor putting mat so far.
The first thing I tried to keep the putter square was use a cheap home depot laser level tool which works great with an indoor putting mat as shown below:
Those laser tools are around $15-$20 – mine is so old or I would provide a link. It’s a useful tool which draws a red line that makes alignment pretty easy (also handy for hanging pictures and what not). As long as you put it behind your line and slightly above, it will draw a line on the ball all the way to the target, as well as a line on you putter at address, as well as the back swing and follow through,
The other thing I’ve been fooling around with is around setting my line properly. On a lark, I bought these mini lasers on Amazon for $14 (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B081T7TQ3V/) which are powered by 3 triple AA batteries. It comes with two battery compartments but one was fine for powering both lasers. If you want to mount the battery compartment near the grip like I did, you also need to find some extra wire to connect it all up. With a little sweat and ingenuity and a whole lot of tape later, I repurposed a cheap old putter to be my Laser Putt 3000:
It’s turned out much better than I anticipated. It’s a great alignment aid as well as good way for me to recalibrate my start line so my club face is square. What I like about it is that I can keep my eye on the ball during my putting stroke and instantly get feedback if my face is square. It takes some calibration to get the lasers pointing the right way and to be straight, but it only took a couple of minutes so if I didn’t have an extra putter I would easily have used my normal mallet putter. The lasers aren’t as powerful as my laser level but they get the job done.
I’m actually surprised no one has a built this commercially; maybe they have but I haven’t seen them. I imagine a clip on version that connects to the shaft of a normal putter would do the trick and by putting the batteries close to the grip, it doesn’t feel too clunky or out of balance.
I cannot confirm or deny that my wife thinks I’m crazy, but for a few dollars, it turned out to be a fun experiment.
