Imitation or innovation : Improved manufacturing methods have preserved more than a few century-old design concepts - Brief Article

Hugh Philp, Simon Cossar, Willie Park Sr. and Old Tom Morris were among the preeminent clubmakers of the 19th century. More than 100 years later, their design principles can still be seen in today's high-tech clubs. Oversize heads, insert putters and no-hosel woods were around at the turn of the century. Metal woods and shaped shafts are nearly that old as well. "Design Darwinism shows us that only the strong club concepts survive to spawn their progeny, while the weaker will wither and disappear," says Dick Rugge of Taylor Made.

Consumers are correct in believing that modern clubs are far superior in terms of forgiveness and precision. Yet the overall designs used by modern clubmakers are not altogether that much different from some turn-of-the-century offerings. "There has been a lot more effort put into equipment design in the last 10 years, but the basic laws of physics haven't changed over the last 100 years," says Art Chou, a member of Golf Digest's Technical Advisory Panel. "The basic principles of design have stayed the same and always will be the same. If you want to hit the ball higher, you have to get the weight down low. That's why design approaches have stayed fairly consistent."

Manufacturing comes of age

While the essential principles of club design may not have changed, the manner in which those principles are applied today is very different from just a few decades ago. Most of that difference is due to new manufacturing technology.

"What we're learning now is the science behind the intuition," says Callaway's Richard Helmstetter. "I have 10 kids working here, and every one of them has a computer workstation with more computing power than what we used to send Buzz Aldrin to the moon. We're learning things now, because we can measure them."

Golf club design used to be a visual art form. Clubmakers would shape pieces of wood or metal until they looked right, hoping that the clubs would perform as well as they appeared. Sometimes the evolution of a design principle (such as roll and bulge) took years and years. That is no longer the case.

"Trial and error in the hands of an experienced clubmaker could, and did, result in some fine golf clubs," says Rugge. "Things started to really change around the late 1980s when the initial experiments with computer analysis of ball flight and computer-aided design [CAD] were begun. Now we can design a golf club on a CAD computer in a few hours, modify it in a few minutes and analyze it in a few seconds. We can judge how it looks and predict how it will perform, all without leaving the computer screen. We're freer to try many different designs. Luck is now being replaced with science, art and skill."

Another area of manufacturing technology we're seeing more of is the ability to combine metals previously thought to be incompatible. "Back in the '50s and '60s we had an aluminum-brass putter that was done in the foundry and the materials were locked together," says Wilson's Bob Mendralla, who has been designing clubs for more than 50 years. "It was a good design, except for the fact that some of them came loose and you didn't have that solid feel. We also put tungsten disks on the backs of our 1200 irons back in the '60s. We epoxied them in there, but some of the disks fell off. I wish we could have cast them in there like they do today, because nothing would have fallen apart. The adhesives we have now are also 100 percent better."

Manufacturers were unable to harness the benefits of titanium, a lightweight yet durable material, until just a few years ago. "After the titanium industry learned how to cast titanium heads cost-effectively, it was up to the golf industry's design engineers to learn how to make better designs based on this new capability," says Howard Lindsay, a member of Golf Digest's Technical Advisory Panel. "The material had radically different characteristics, a higher strength than stainless steel, and designers could therefore make thinner faces without them breaking at impact."

"With titanium woods, it wasn't just the largeness of the head, which was never approached in any antique wood," says Golfsmith's Tom Wishon. "The combination of a higher-strength material with greater elasticity was a pretty substantial achievement in clubhead design.

"No such animal as a bimetal iron ever existed in the old days, and none of the really old irons ever employed a complete cavity surrounded 360 degrees by raised metal."

Have clubs been perfected?

"I think we're very close to optimization, if you believe that the materials and the technology we employ is the end of the road of development," says Wishon. "On the other hand, if you buy into the theory that materials are out there yet to be fabricated or discovered, then no, we're not at the apex of our development."

Callaway's Helmstetter refers to an intellectual notion that came out of M.I.T.--the S-curve of innovation. "If you draw a big capital S and start at the bottom, it's pretty flat but is curving upward slightly," he says. "Then it goes vertical. It goes upward really fast and then starts to flatten out again. I think we're probably in the middle or upper third of one of those vertical stretches."

Golf clubs have evolved for 400 years and have been on the road to optimization that entire time. The design elements may be similar from year to year, but the technology application results in a different--and much improved--product.

The information and photographs of the antique clubs shown are from the book, The Clubmaker's Art, by Jeff Ellis. To order, phone 888-394-9333.

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