[jmessner]

I can easily align sweetspot with handle - w/ dowel or w/o dowel. Dowel makes it easier to confirm the alignment in the mirror, thou.

The point I was trying to make was; it takes rather few N's to bend the shaft, hence the huge amount of N's produced by CF will bend the saft and in-line grip and sweet spot.

This may be inconsequential to the plane line tracing discussion, but from the clubmaking forums I frequent I have seen the following regarding clubhead/shaft lead (bending forward toward target) and droop:

-The maximum amount of lead or droop is determined by the Center of Gravity (CoG = Sweetspot?) of the head. Theoretically, the shaft should be able to bend no more than in-line with the CoG.
-This maximum amount of lead or droop is by no means always guaranteed and is dependent on swing and shaft characteristics.
-While the centrifugal force is primarily reponsible for this bending toward an in-line condition with the CoG, it is also creating a force that pulls outward (away from the golfer) which creates an effect called "centrifugal stiffening" with the net result being that the forces requried to bend a shaft in motion (in a rotational sense) can be much higher than those required to bend a shaft at rest.