Wearing a neatly trimmed beard and a dark shop apron, surrounded by strange machines as he sits at his laptop, Henry Fink looks more like a research scientist than a man who builds golf clubs.

In a way, he's both.

Fink, of Whitefish Bay, is immersed in the science of golf. He can talk for hours about the physics of spin rate and launch angle and the role they play in keeping a golf ball aloft, or how and why the swing decelerates dramatically just after impact.

When a golfer tests a club on his $15,000 radar launch monitor, Fink can describe each swing and resulting ball flight without even watching.

He stares intently at his laptop, hits a few keys and announces where the ball was struck on the club face, how many degrees the face was open or closed at impact and the trajectory and length of the shot.

Fink, a Class A member of the Professional Clubmakers Society, is on the cutting edge of custom fitting and club-building. He works out of his small, tidy store in Fox Point called "Tee to Green Custom Clubs."

Using technology and components once available only to PGA Tour professionals, Fink can help golfers maximize their ability by getting them "dialed in" on equipment.

"I offer the best service you can get and the best equipment you can buy," he said. "I'm basically a stationary tour van."

The component club business once was viewed with skepticism by most golfers, who put their trust in name brands and made the majority of their purchases at retail outlets or golf shops.

But Fink and others like him now buy club heads from the same foundries used by the major equipment manufacturers. Only a few club builders nationally have access to tour-quality shafts and Fink, who regularly attends club-making seminars and classes, is among them.

Still, good equipment alone won't necessarily make you a better golfer.

"There's no skill in sticking a round peg in a round hole," said Fink, who was an operating room technician and taught children with learning disabilities before discovering golf in the early 1990s. "It's all about getting the right shaft in the right head.

"I don't care what piece of equipment you get. It's about the fitting."

To that end, Fink invested in a Flight Scope launch monitor, which uses radar instead of cameras and provides extremely accurate data about club head and ball speed, ball spin, vertical and horizontal launch angle, trajectory and carry and something called the "smash factor" - the efficiency of the strike.