From the product manager’s briefing, the club designer, Charles, designed the first driver 900 for advanced players (handicap less than 15). He designed a club that aims to be athletic and elegant, taking after the 500 driver, which it gets its forgiveness qualities from, but whose power and control, especially, are boosted.
It’s at this stage in development that Alexandre comes into the picture. Alex is our 3D sculptor. His job is to turn a design into a 3-dimensional digital object. A modern day sculptor, we’re telling you.
Alex went back to the 500 driver form. To respond to the design specifications from the project manager, the first step was to move the head by 10° and to reduce to volume to 440cm3, which is expected to an advanced club. Next, he applied the outline of Charles’ drawing, particularly marking the position of the two adjustable legs, which allow the height of ball flight to be adjusted.
It’s important to go step by step. As a matter of fact, each time that we make a change to the design, we’ will also change the driver’s characteristics, for example, its centre of gravity. That’s why Alex works closely with Kevin, our club engineer based in Texas, USA.
1. FORGIVENESS
A driver’s forgiveness can be directly measured through the value of its moment of inertia (M.O.I.). That is, the resistance opposing the head as it rotates on its vertical axis. Here, we don’t want a maximum M.O.I. like on a beginner’s club. We have set a lower value which lets advanced golfers control the ball and get ball flight in draws and fades. Kevin has researched the ideal level of forgiveness for advanced players, which allows a guaranteed excellent distance, even on strokes which aren’t taken full plate.
It is possible to reach the maximum power allowed for a driver by the R&A by working on the characteristics of the head: materials, club face thickness, centre of gravity, etc. It has particularly been discovered that by positioning the centre of gravity closest to the head’s axis of symmetry (Neutral Axis), we got the highest smash factor (ball speed / club speed) and the lowest spin, and that’s what we really want!
Picturing your shot and taking it, that’s what advanced players love to do. For this, the 900 driver has an adjustable weight system with different masses that can be switched forwards and backwards.
It’s also possible to play about with ball flight by lowering or increasing the loft angle and backspin.
The red weights on the image are made of tungsten and weigh 14 grams, the sky blue weight is made of aluminium and weighs 4 grams.
Kevin has also worked a lot on the sound produced by the 900 driver upon impact. The enemy is the low frequencies. By calculating the head’s frequency at all points (and dividing the rigidity by the mass), we have located the low-frequency areas and stiffened them.
That’s the job of the red reinforcements on the image. These “ribs” straddle the adjustable weights’ housings as they are structurally weak areas that create low frequencies.
By stiffening these areas, it should be able to produce a really lovely sound upon impact, which brings great joy to any golfer.
At this stage, our production engineers, Binny and Paul, get fully involved in the matter of the driver 900. They have to analyse the choices made by the design team to see how they can be applied to production. A real challenge!
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