In their own ways, today's golf-equipment engineers are no less virtuosos than the craftsmen of the past. "Most CAD engineers we bring in from other industries don't have experience as complicated as what's needed in golf," says Bret Wahl, senior director of research and development of irons at TaylorMade. "It's crazy to think this way, but golf is one of the most free-form design structures in any industry that uses CAD. And golfers are a little nutty. They have high scrutiny and demand high accuracy."
But it goes beyond the discerning eye of the golfer. As the game's innovation race has intensified, the remaining room for improvement is dwindling just as rapidly. To find something new in golf equipment today, you cannot expect it to come through broad strokes. Instead, it must be laser surgery. You are not merely looking for a needle in a haystack, you are trying to innovate within the space of the eye of that needle.
Enter devices like the CMM, or coordinate-measuring machine, which can cost well into five figures. A robotic-armed, pincer-like probe, it is used to measure every weld line, curve and orifice on a clubhead down to a thousandth of an inch. It's used to determine where weight can be saved, where one material can be optimized over another, and how carefully the ideas of a CAD engineer can be consistently reproduced by a $5-a-day hand welder in the factory in Zhongshan, China.
As Callaway's Hocknell says, "We have command over the design to where we can sweat over the last gram."
Virtual 3-D models of clubhead designs are standard practice with CAD software programs like Pro/Engineer, used by Mizuno on its movable-weight MP-600 driver design.
That interpretive ability isn't restricted to manufacturers, either. The team at the USGA's Research and Test Center is CAD-savvy, too. "Our task is to see what's beyond the horizon," says Dick Rugge, senior technical director. "Well, you could go down to the local soothsayer for that, but we already have the soothsayer: It's called finite-element analysis."
Meanwhile, some manufacturers clearly are working to digitize the institutional knowledge of the look and feel of a traditional golf club. At Mizuno, Llewellyn builds a step into the development of every iron in which the characteristic tweaks of craftsmen are "reverse-engineered" into the original digital-design files. Imaging software literally converts a 3-D photograph of an actual clubhead into a virtual clubhead. At Callaway, the characteristics of every design have been calculated in more than 100 separate parameters, which are then built into the club-design software to automatically generate the rough form of an entire set just from the shape of the 6-iron. And at TaylorMade, what once was the art of club design has been digitally remastered.
"We can put in formulas that capture the features we used to be able to design only by hand," says Vincent. "It took us a long time before CAD was able to match the art. But we fully extracted the formula for that art form."
Still, there remains a gray area in golf-club design that lives just beyond the reach of science. It's no stretch to say that what has been learned and documented in the R&D labs of the top golf companies in just the last decade far surpasses what might have been understood in the preceding 100 years. Yet it remains a simple stick-and-ball game. A veteran like Solheim knows that some answers are still found in the old, familiar places. Like in the corner of his desk, where he keeps a ready supply of modeling clay.
"Some things," he says, "you just can't CAD in."
Above, Callaway's Virtual Test Center shows the perfect ball flight of my driver; inset, a 3-D printout of "the Platypus."
Platypus Illustration: Jim Herity
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