Harbor log · 12 Jan 2026
Winter indoor dry-out
August in Toledo is a wet argument. January is a dry one. Nylon ferrules live through both in the same golf year, often without anyone thinking of the calendar as a tool. The crack that shows up on a driver collar in the second week of January is frequently the second half of a swell that started on a humid Tuesday in July. The ring drank. Then it lived next to a furnace return. Then it split along the line of the last turn.
Indoor winter air in this city is desert-adjacent. Houses button up. Heat runs. Attics over garages swing harder than living rooms. We see a run of cracked wood collars every year after the first long cold snap, almost all of them from clubs that “lived upstairs until spring.” Upstairs is not a bag room. It is a climate. A thin-walled ferrule that was already turned too far in a mall install has no extra meat when the material shrinks. The split follows the tool mark because that is the thin place.
People bring these in and ask if we can glue the split. Glue on a split collar is a costume. The ring is no longer a cylinder; it is a C-clip with nostalgia. We split the rest of it on a block, check the tip for heat-gun gloss (mall installs love heat), and replace with cabinet stock turned with a wall that can survive the next January. If the graphite is already glossy from a previous heat shove, Marek says so. A new collar will not un-cook fibers.
There is a related habit we have to talk about without sounding like a pamphlet: the dashboard warm-up. A golfer takes the driver into a cold car, lays it on the dash “just to take the chill off,” and parks in a south window. The cabin becomes an oven at the same time the outdoor air is a freezer. Nylon hates that swing. We had a downtown loft customer do this twice in one winter. The second ring was on him. We still charged the humidity-and-dry rate, not a lecture rate. The lecture is this paragraph.
Iron collars crack less often than woods in January because the OD is smaller and the wall, if it was turned with any sense, has less ring to shrink. When irons do split, it is usually the scoring clubs that lived in a hallway next to a heat vent, or a single iron that was reshafted in the fall with pegboard nylon. Fall installs are sneaky. The shop feels dry. The stock feels fine. Then October rain, then furnace season, then a split that looks like vandalism. It is not vandalism. It is a calendar.
If you store clubs inside for winter, pick a closet that is not on top of a register and not against a south window. If you already have a split, bring the club before you try to tape it. Tape residue on a neck is a longer ticket than a clean split. We would rather see you on a Tuesday in January than on a Saturday in April when you need the driver and the joint has been taped since the ice storm.
Sunday and Monday we are closed. The hang rack does not run on furnace time. Plan the pickup for an open day, and give a new joint a quiet night if we opened it. January epoxy windows are actually generous compared with July. The air is the problem, not the clock on the cup. The air is always the problem.