North County Becomes Center of High-Tech Golf Club Production
Designers at the research and development facility search for a new exotic compound to combat the competition’s high polymer resin. Talk of titanium, boron and beryllium fills the air as engineers use computers to help them find answers to their technical questions.
Modern warfare? No, this is the world of North County’s golf club makers.
The image of the lone, wizened Scotsman bent over a work bench hand-crafting a niblick fitted with an iron head and a hickory shaft is long gone. Golf clubs have entered the age of space and espionage, foreign competition and back-alley manufacturing plants. The discussion today is not about persimmon heads, but about Luaramid, the high-polymer resin the West Germans use for high-tech gear mechanisms and bulletproof vests.
North County is on the crest of this new wave in golf. But it’s not because there are so many golf courses in the area, but because of the region’s aerospace industry. The area is the operating base for four of the biggest names in golf manufacturing as well as several smaller firms.
Shaft maker Aldila, which specializes in boron/graphite club shafts, was begun in 1972 by aerospace engineers as a composites and research company. Now based in Rancho Bernardo, Aldila is considered a leader in composite club shafts. Aldila says its 300 employees can pump out more than 15,000 shafts per day.
Titleist, probably the most famous name in golf, has its U.S. club plant in Escondido, employing 110 people. “We have been here since 1967,” said John Worster, director of western operations for Titleist. “A lot of technology used in casting (club heads) comes from the aerospace industry and obviously this is the center of that.” Titleist’s club sales topped $27 million last year.
Taylor Made has 300 employees at its Carlsbad plant and the company reported total domestic sales of $110 million last year. “Taylor Made was founded on the basis of the metal wood,” said John Steinbach of Taylor Made.
Cobra, a company known for its revolutionary club design, is based in Oceanside. It is set to build a new plant on four acres near Palomar Airport that will contain a sophisticated research lab. Cobra has attached a Luaramid head to a red titanium shaft. That, says John Krone, assistant marketing director, is the next step up from metal heads.
Titleist is working on its own innovations. Worster said the company is working closely with Mitsubishi Rayon Company of Japan and is 90% through a project that will match a graphite shaft to a new club head. “The U.S. government trusted them (Mitsubishi) on graphite struts for the FSX fighter, so we can trust them too,” he said.
The idea of all this scrambling, says Krone of Cobra, is to “keep up with the Joneses.”
Recently, the club makers in North County feared that the Joneses had made a quantum leap when Japanese player Jumbo Ozaki lent a driver to Jack Nicklaus for the Masters tournament in Augusta, Ga. The club was Ozaki’s Bridgestone “J” Professional Weapon driver. Nicklaus claimed he hit the ball farther--and straighter--than ever. That’s all the club makers had to hear.
“We have done analysis work on those,” said Pete Piotrowski, vice president of engineering for Aldila. “We need to stay abreast of what’s happening, but we also looked into it at the behest of some of our customers.”
After a months-long search to find out what made the driver special, most manufacturers have come to the conclusion: Not much. A Taylor Made ad calls the driver “Mumbo Jumbo” since it did not perform any better in tests than previous metal-head clubs.
“It caused a big stir, but it is not anything revolutionary,” Piotrowski said. “Jack Nicklaus hitting the ball further makes it unique. His credibility is incredible.”
Piotrowski noted that, at the Memorial tournament that followed the Masters, Nicklaus did not use the club.
Still, the perception exists in the minds of passionate golfers that technology can solve a bad swing and that perception is fed by the makers themselves. Taylor Made’s new series of putters, for example, looks like a Klingon weapon out of “Star Trek.”
All this makes a ripe environment for industrial espionage.
Taylor Made recently issued a statement announcing judgments against Mitsushiba, Nassau Investment Casting and Dynascore for counterfeiting its clubs. The company is also pursuing several Taiwanese casting houses for making unauthorized copies. According to Aldila’s Piotrowski, copying occurs all over the golf industry, at least partly because so many club makers, like Cobra, for example, cast their heads in Taiwan and Japan, where copyright enforcement is a sometimes thing.
The companies continue to fight back with more technology and public relations, the most important component of which is tour visibility. The thinking goes that the more top pros each company can lure into using its clubs, (always for a hefty fee), the more average hackers will line up to buy. The companies bank on getting their boldly imprinted bags seen on television.
Cobra, which has been short on tour representation, is in the process of announcing a deal with superstar Greg Norman, who according to research and development director Dick Liesz, will soon become part of the company. Taylor Made boasts Mark O’Meara and LPGA champion Patty Sheahan.
In addition to the public relations campaigns, the research into new clubs continues.
Titleist is using a technique called computer-aided face-mapping. This allows its engineers to match an impact point on the club face to the flight of the ball to determine the shape and size of the optimum hitting area, popularly known as the “sweet spot.”
Cobra said new materials and manufacturing processes are being attempted all the time. “With us being one of the largest users in the country of graphite prepreg (raw graphite), there are suppliers at our doorstep all the time with new materials,” Piotrowski said. He said a computer engineering system developed by the aerospace business allows researchers to design a golf shaft in minutes, then produce a prototype.
Clubs have advanced so far, there’s even a move to look back--sort of a retro golf theory. Titleist’s famous Bullseye putter seems to be making a comeback.
“There are a lot of tour pros enamored with the Bullseyes that were made in the 1950s and ‘60s,” Worster said. “We are going to introduce a line of Bullseyes called Classics . . . which is sort of reverse product development.”
Still, there’s no doubt that the push by North County’s golf club makers will be strongly forward. In the future, the club makers say, scientific minds that have been dedicated to military research may be redirected in a new area--building a better golf club.
