Over the coming months, we will be doing a series of post's, in order to help prevent you from purchasing one of the ever increasing amount of fake's on the market.
Be it a putter, headcover or ball marker, we aim to point you in the right direction and not only help you in your purchasing, but also help each other, in reporting counterfeit's. Something which you can do here.
PART 1
Here we are comparing the Studio Select Newport 1.5.
If you have already purchased a Scotty Cameron putter, but are concerned about it's authenticity and if it's one of Scotty's newer stainless steel models, you can check by taking a magnet to it. The fake's are normally cast steel and the magnet will stick to it. Stainless is not normally magnetic, but you may find there is a very slight pull of the magnet, should you place it up to a stainless head. A lot of Scotty's older model's were made from carbon steel, which IS magnetic. His current range of putter's, along with the previous Black Mist Select series, Studio Select like below and some older model's like the Studio Style, are stainless and not magnetic. There is also a few aluminium models out there, which are not magnetic either.
Colour and finish is vastly different when comparing the real against a fake, but hopefully you can learn to see the difference from the below pictures.
General headshape is poor, the neck show's it is badly finished and you can see the sole bulges slightly around the weight. Spacing of the sole engravings are not correct and face milling is not comparable to the genuine Scotty putter. There is a dullness to the grey finish of the fake, whereas the real one you can tell is milled stainless steel. Stainless CAN rust, if the steel hasn't been looked after at all and/or the steel itself was of poor quality to begin with, but the fake will wear extremely quickly and rust will start very quickly indeed. You can also expect the shaft to start rusting quickly too.
The grip is the next tell tale. The fake is mostly pink and is the wrong length(10 3/8" real vs 9 7/8" fake), although with time, any grip can shrink. A lot of the time with fake grips, they can smell very badly...very strong rubber smell.
The shaftband on the fakes are normally on the front face of the shaft. Scotty places all his shaftband's on the rear of the shaft, so it isn't noticeable at address. Also, on this fake, the shaftband is a California band...something which only came on the California models and this one is actually poorly coloured and not accurate of the real California shaftbands.
If you ever have any concerns regarding an item you have purchased, or thinking of purchasing, please fill in the contact form here, or email us at contact-us@customcameron.co.uk and we will get back to you ASAP.