Field work log for October 21, 2021.
Discs used:
Putters (all max weight):
- Innova Pig, R-Pro (White)
- Prodigy M2, 300 (White)
- Innova Aviar3, Star (Yellow)
- Innova Aviar3, DX (Blue)
Drivers
- Innova Archon, Gstar (Blue, 175g)
- Innova Mystère, Star (Brown, 168g)
The putters
I’ve been trying to figure out putters for a while. Putters come in basically two flavors: putting putters and “throwing” putters. The first type is obvious; it’s the disc that you put with. These are the zero to ~80-foot shots where you’re seriously trying to get the disc to hit chains. This is mostly a question of hand-feel (I use Discraft Roaches mostly because that’s what feels good to me now…). The throwing putter and like high irons in a ball golf bag; they’re good for approach shots and/or throwing off the teepad for shorter holes.
This is a part of my game that I need to work on. For shots within about 200-ft I h to like to “power-down” on a mid-range disc like a Mako3. This is basically like throwing an Ultimate disc for me, where I can throw at 40% power but with “touch” to make sure the disc lands where I want it to (and not at the maximum range that I can throw the disc). However, as my form has improved, it’s actually starting to get difficult to back off the power on the mid-range enough and keep the shot controlled. Especially for approach shots at about 150-ft, I needed to expand the discs available to my bag.
In the last tournament that I played, I realized that I’d been missing a “straight” putter in my bag. I’d recently gone out and bought a few of the standard over-stable molds including the Pig and M2 listed above as well as a Discmania Tactic, and Discraft Zone. Those are all well and good, but I ended up throwing my “putting putter” on a few shots where I didn’t want the putter to finish hard right and risk a “skip” near the basket and go out of bounds (this also happens a lot). Digging into the garage stack of “discs I have but aren’t currently in rotation”, I dug out the Aviar3s.
Aviars are the granddaddy of disc golf putters. And there are oodles of variations in the plastic type (“KC Pro” named after the disc golf legend Ken Climo who helped Innova come up with the plastic blend, I think) and “speed variations” (the Aviar3 and the AviarX3) based on the same basic design. I’d picked both of these discs up entirely by chance at the pro shop at our local course when I showed up with family and we decided to play a round. They occupied space as “putter putters” before I realized that neither of them really felt right (because they’re throwing putters…). As I’ve graduated up to mid-ranges, I’d banished these two to the garage for use when taking out friends that wanted to learn. They’re both a bit older, and I hadn’t really taken the time to throw them for probably a year.
Today’s putter practice was all about precision and figuring out “what line can I throw the disc on and land it right next to the pin?” The two overstable molds (the M2 and the Pig) were there as a foil for the straight/understable discs to play against. The wind was about 5-10 mph and left to right with a slight head/tail wind. As I switched ends I got to throw both with a headwind and a tail wind.
I’d started with stand-still approach shots from 150-ft. This is about as close to a “chip” shot in ball golf as you can get. At 150-ft the discs were all pretty much the same. I could throw them on a hyzer line (moving right to left) and reliably land all of them within about 15 feet of the target. This is about a 40% effort shot with a good amount of spin and the angle makes it easy to predict the flight of the discs.
Moving back to about 200-ft is where the difference started to become more clear. The DX Aviar3 had noticeably less glide on the tailwind direction, meaning that the bottom seemed to drop out of the shot and it was easy to leave the disc about 30 feet short. Also at this distance, the fact that the M2 is actually a midrange and not a putter started to be noticeable; throwing the M2 with a bit more power the disc wanted to take off and, while on the intended line, ended up about 30 to 50-ft long of the target. The Pig is great, so long as you can throw it on a wide right-to-left hyzer line. If you have any obstructed throws (I simulated this by having to throw to the left of a tree about 30 feet ahead of me with the target straight ahead) then the Pig forces you into a forehand (sidearm) throw because you just can’t really turn it over on an anhyzer (left-to-right) line. Somewhat surprisingly, the DX Aviar3 thrown upwind on an anhyzer line actually was perfectly controllable at this distance and I could regularly hit the target. The Star Aviar3 was just…meh. This particular disc is a bit “bendy” in the hand (the Star plastic is much more supple and flexible than the DX plastic, but wears out less quickly). I ended up having to throw it fairly hard to get the disc to turn over, which mean that at 200-ft it was hard to get a controlled shot near the target.
Setting up for my driver practice, I moved the target back to 300-ft and decided to give the putters a whirl and a “full send” drive. Unsurprisingly (as a mid-range) the M2 flew beautifully out to about 250-ft on a straight line with a little bit of fade. At this speed and spin the DX Aviar3 just gave up the ghost and either turned over to the right with that much torque or just died down to the ground. The Pig I could force over onto a flex line (forcing the disc to go left-to-right at the start, with the stability of the disc pulling it back so that it finished right-to-left at the end) and I could get about 230-fit out of it. The one surprise here was the Star Aviar3. Especially upwind, I could rip on the disc and keep it gun barrel straight without any drift to the right and with minimal finish to the left for about a 230 to 250-ft shot. While that’s great, this is well within the “easy throwing” distance for most of my midranges.
Putter takeaways:
I think the DX Aviar3 is going into the bag for the time being as a utility “straight-to-understable” disc for 150-ft shots. The Star Aviar3 is going back to the garage (sorry buddy). I need to go out again for more field work just for the stable putters to see if the Pig earns a spot in the bag against the Zone or the Tactic. The M2 is a nice “bridge” disc between the putter and my mid-ranges, so it definitely stays in my bag.
Turnover Drivers
The two drivers I have are basically cousins of each other. Both are “high speed” discs, with a wing shape that gives them a good amount of turn (rightward drift) when you throw them flat and hard. These were discs I hadn’t thrown in a while, so I wanted to give them a try to see how they felt out of the hand. I have another understable distance driver mold (the Shryke, which we’ll talk about later) and a relatively beat-in Wraith that are current in the bag that basically satisfy my “right drifting” distance shots. The goal here wast to play with these discs and see if I could get either of them into a comfortable “hyzer flip” shot.
For those who don’t know, a hyzer flip is a shot where you release it on a hyzer line so that a “straight flying” disc would go right-to-left. However, because the disc is understable (and I’m throwing it hard) the disc “flips” up and drifts to the right a bit before either finishing straight or fading back out to the left. This is a skill shot that is great for generating lots of distance, but it can be very touchy. The difference in release angle between the “hyzer flip” line and the “turnover to the right” shot (which is what these discs naturally want to do) can sometimes be very touchy. Especially when learning how to throw this shot, finding the balance of angle control and speed control to get the disc to do what you want can be tough.
Neither of these discs are ones that I actually chose. The Archon I got as a “mystery disc” add on to an order sometime last year, while the Mystére was a “play pack” disc for a tournament (which I didn’t end up getting to participate in at the last minute, but the tournament director sent me the player pack anyways, which made my week).
So the goal of test driving these discs were two fold: (1) Could I get either of the discs to hyzer flip reliably? And (2) How do the discs perform when you put them on a massive anhyzer/turnover line?
Fairly quickly into my field work today I realized that my particular field may be giving me skewed results. In order to get enough space for a ~350-ft shot, I end up having to throw around or between a pair of bushy, 50-ft tall trees. The gap between the trees is only about 50-ft wide, and because of the geometry of the field the best place to throw distance is such that the gap is about 150-ft ahead of me. This means that the window that I have to hit a shot with any kind of movement gets very tight. Either I slam the disc into the tree, or I start the disc with too much turn in order to have it hit the gap and it can’t tend to fight out of it. To really try these discs out on a hyzer flip line I think I need to head over to another field with lots of nice open space and play around with the release angles.
What I was able to work on today was really engaging my core muscles when throwing the discs on high turnover lines. These are useful shots on a real course when you have to throw over trees or around a corner. But because you have to throw the disc so high to clear the trees, you end to sacrifice a good amount of distance. After getting the shots I wanted to throw dialed in, I was regularly hitting these discs on 300-ft “shaped” lines between the trees or over the trees. Which I count as a success, even if it doesn’t really give me a lot of information about what I should do with these discs on a totally open shot.
Overall, the Archon was way more touchy. About half the shots I threw (even the high turnovers) ended up crashing out to the right at about 250-ft of total distance. The GStar plastic is known for being both a bit cheaper than the Star plastic and a bit less stable. So I think it makes sense that the disc ended up being a little difficult to dial in. The Mystére was similarly prone to turning over to the right, but had enough stability that it was able to fight out with some late right-to-left finish. However, by the time that happened the speed on the disc was so low that you didn’t really get much additional “push” out of the flight. The disc just starts fading left and then dropped out of the sky.
I did hit a couple of huge lines that looked like they’d go on for a while, but then got caught in a tree at ~275-ft about 50-ft up. Max distance for either disc was about 330-ft on the day.
Driver takeaways
I doubt either of these discs will end up in the bag any time soon. However, they will definitely will get used in the future when I take all of my understable discs out to a field and do some full send and max distance tests. Neither one seemed to give me a hyzer-flip-to-flat shot that worked in these conditions. But that may just be the result of the tree topology…more to come.
Final thoughts
So that was about 40 minutes of throwing and about an hour of writing. Which I guess is about the right balance for trying to think through disc and shot selection and what these discs are intended to do if they are going in the bag. I liked having the structure of my drills today (rather than just “how far can I throw?” field work, which I’ve done before).
I think my next throwing day should probably be a test of the overstable putters and then some practice throwing in my mid-ranges before coming back to drivers sometime in the future.