Callaway says the next generation of golf-club technology could be about more than incremental gains, with a new additive-manufacturing platform giving its engineers the freedom to re-think some of the fundamental limitations of driver design.
Brian Williams, Callaway’s chief technology officer, says the company’s investment in 3D printing has created an entirely new toolkit for its R&D team – and he believes the technology could deliver meaningful advances for years to come.
RELATED: The clubs Blades Brown used to win the WWT Championship
“We’re not running short on ideas,” Williams tells Australian Golf Digest. “We’re not running short on a vision for how to make better golf clubs, more desirable golf clubs for our consumers. We see the future as bright from an innovation standpoint.”
At the heart of the new approach is Callaway’s Tri-Force 3D Face [pictured], an additive-manufactured titanium driver face featuring a gyroid lattice structure. The design allows engineers to control mass, stiffness and deflection in ways that conventional casting and forging cannot.
Callaway says the technology has allowed it to remove more than eight grams from areas of the face where mass is less useful, then redistribute that weight to improve aerodynamics, face performance and stability.
Williams argues that the significance goes beyond simply making a lighter face.
“We have a new playbook, we have a new set of rules that we get to design to, and that’s freedom for designers,” he said. “We’ve talked about unshackling our engineering team and letting them have an all-new approach to club design.”
That philosophy is already being demonstrated through TD-NIRVANA, a technology concept based on the Triple Diamond driver footprint. According to Williams, the design maintains the same shape and mass properties while increasing MOI by 10 percent, creating a combination of compact player-oriented shaping and substantially greater stability.
RELATED: How a 150-centimetre-tall LPGA Tour pro might spark a revolution in your golf bag
The bigger picture, however, extends beyond the clubhead. Callaway is also investing in biomechanics research at its Ely Callaway Performance Center in Carlsbad, California, studying how individual golfers deliver the club to the ball.
“Everybody’s made up differently, everybody has a different biomechanic buildup, different power potential, different dimensions, different levels of flexibility,” Williams said. The goal, he explained, is to understand those differences and “optimally design product for the different people that are out there”.
Williams also believes additive manufacturing could eventually transform tour customisation, allowing Callaway to produce highly precise specifications while reducing the manufacturing variation traditionally associated with custom-built equipment.
The company has been researching 3D printing for eight years and has been printing in-house for four, according to Williams. Just yesterday, Callaway announced a $US15 million investment in a new advanced 3D printing facility in Fort Worth, Texas. Williams says Callaway deliberately waited until it could demonstrate a genuine performance advantage before bringing the technology to market.
“Printing alone doesn’t make it special,” he said. “It doesn’t make it breakthrough. It’s, Why are you printing this? What kind of problem are you trying to solve?”
For Callaway, the answer is increasingly about removing compromises that golfers and engineers have long accepted.
“We don’t have to accept those same rules anymore,” Williams said. “We have a new playbook.”
And, according to Williams, this may only be the beginning.
