Today I went up to my grandparent's house in Trumansburg to work on making my golf shaft with help from my grandfather. We started out by choosing a good piece of wood with a straight grain and would be durable and strong. In the end the best piece we found was a 36"x1"x1" rod of cherry wood. We started out by first cutting it down so it would be 30"x5/8"x5/8", and from that we just shaped it to how I wanted it to be.

I can't really make these images larger or else they would overextend into the webpage, so just squint or something.
This was the piece before we did anything:

And this was it after cutting it down to the desired size:

Now the tool next to the block we then used to taper the piece evenly down to about 2 inches before the end. We left the last 2 inches of the tip untouched because we decided it would be better to know the size of the threaded hole in the putter before actually threading the shaft.

After tapering it, I used my grandfathers wood router with a 5/16" rounded bit to round the edges of the shaft. For the final part of the session I sanded down the main part of the shaft to make it more round and smooth. Both end have about 2 inches of uncut area so that if I ever need to clamp it down again, I would be able to, along with allowing for changes in the future to the design of the shaft. The end product of the day is this, and I'm satisfied with the result.

Sorry for the poor quality, my phone was dying and had no flash, I'll get a better quality version up once its charged. As you might be able to see, its still square at either end, and the right side is slimmer than the left, since that would be the tip side. The wooden shaft is also a bit smaller than my current putter's, which is good since I needed a smaller shaft. In the weeks to come I'll be sanding the shaft more to make it more rounded and slimmer, so that I can fit a grip on it since I don't think any current grips are made to fit over a 5/8" shaft. The cherry wood will also darken more, and along with me giving it a good polyurethane finish, it should have a nice dark tone in the end.

My plan now is to finish choosing a final design for my putter head and getting it into CAD Inventor, then Edgecam, which is the program for the CNC Mill of the school.