You wrote-: "Jeff your diagrams of Appleby might seem to suggest a curving path of the hands and a shaft non aligned to the plane at times. Leadbetter came to a similar conclusion I think. But what if App's plane line was drawn to show his shifts? The hands in 3-D space might still travel in a curve but the club might be seen to remain on the plane at all times with the butt pointing at the baseline. If he is on plane, that is."
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I think that Appleby's clubshaft is always "on plane" if the peripheral end of the club always points at the baseline. However, his clubshaft is not on a single plane. It is on an near-infinite number of planes (depending on how thin you slice the planes) between the turned shoulder plane and the elbow plane during the early/mid downswing, and it is therefore continuously shifting planes. During the early downswing, the "imaginary" clubshaft plane will be steeper, and it will be less steep as the hands progressively reach waist level.
A rough idea of the degree of plane shift of the clubshaft during the downswing can be obtained by tracing the clubhead path using a spline tool.
The following composite photo of Aaron Baddeley's swing shows the splined path of the clubhead (roughly reflecting the angular-shifting of the clubshaft planes during the early/mid downswing) and the splined path of the flat left hand arc. The hand arc plane is steeper and I think that it can only conceived to be on the "same" plane as the clubshaft plane at a "somewhere" point in the mid-downswing.
Threaded Mode
