The new Inesis 500 irons are going to be THE big news of the year. In the last chapter, we told you how 3D designer Alex went from a two-dimensional drawing to a 3D file of each club in the series, ready to be sent to the production plant. Now we're joined by Thibaut, product engineer on the second-generation 500 series, who explains how the industrialization of these clubs went. Interview.
My role is twofold. Very early on in the design process, I'm responsible for defining the technical characteristics of each club according to the specifications written by the product manager: loft, lees, position of the center of gravity, architecture, etc. Today, we have an arsenal of technical solutions at our disposal for fine-tuning the behavior of a club. Today, we have an arsenal of technical solutions for fine-tuning a club's behavior.
Secondly, once the designers' work is done, I act as the link between Inesis and the production plant to industrialize the club we've imagined.
Here too, there are a number of possibilities. Irons are, as the name suggests, made from stainless steel. Stainless steel is made up of iron and carbon. By varying the proportion of one or the other, we obtain different mechanical characteristics.
500 irons are "hollow body" clubs. In other words, the head is hollow, and the face is welded to the body. For the body of 500 irons, we chose 17-4PH steel, the benchmark in the golf industry. It's highly resistant and not very flexible. That's exactly what we're looking for in a rigid structure.
For the face, on the other hand, we need flexibility, a steel that deforms to increase ball speed and improve feel. Steel 455SS best met this need. The face is also forged on 5 to 7 irons and in "L-CUP". This is a major improvement over the first-generation 500 irons. The result is greater power and feel. On small clubs, we've opted for a molded face, which improves spin rate because its surface is less smooth than a forged face.
We have a real collaborative relationship with the production plants. In fact, two members of the Inesis team work directly on site all year round with the fifteen or so industrial partners we need to manufacture our clubs. These two engineers have previously worked for Titleist and Callaway. They know the golf industry inside out. So they help us find the right balance between what we want to do and what is industrially possible. There's obviously a lot of discussion and negotiation before we come to an agreement. This phase lasts several months.
We were so keen to make the best possible clubs, and to make them even better than the first version of the 500, that we had imagined clubs that were quite complex and costly to produce: forged face, L-CUP face, hollow body head, CNC machining, etc. As a result, when we first got feedback from the factory, the price was too high for the target. As a result, when we first heard back from the factory, the price was too high for the target.
We had to negotiate hard, trying to optimize everything we could to lower the cost price without compromising product quality. We're now in a position to offer this 500 series at a quality/price ratio that's going to be quite incredible on the market!
To test prototypes, we need to open molds. A mold is an aluminum part cut from solid. This represents a significant cost and manufacturing time - around 8 weeks.
We first receive a 7-iron, which we test and if all goes well, we validate; if not, we have modifications made. Once the 7-iron has been validated, we open the molds for all the other heads. This allows us to check that the distance between each club is consistent. In fact, we had to make a few adjustments, as the technologies between the small irons and the long irons weren't the same, so the distance gaps weren't constant.
Finally, the molds for the left-handed irons are cast, and the final stage of my work is the signing of the "master samples", i.e. the validated clubs that will be used throughout the industrial and commercial life of the 500 series.
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