By Mike Stachura
Illustration By David Plunkert November 2008

When Karsten Solheim conceived his legendary Anser putter, he doodled it on the album sleeve of one of his favorite LPs. When Barney Adams contemplated how to re-orient fairway-wood design with his Adams Tight Lies, he sketched the prototype design on an airline napkin.

That was then. Today at Callaway, Alan Hocknell, vice president of innovation and advanced design, can explain how golf-equipment innovation has changed in the past decade with a one-word answer to the question, "How many current designs start on paper?" "None," he says.

It's not surprising that the shift in equipment design has happened that fast. The past 15 years have fundamentally altered golf's innovation curve to a straight line into the ionosphere. You can point to the usual suspects. New and better materials? Obviously. More rigorous and repeatable manufacturing techniques? Certainly. An influx of gifted and forward-thinking engineers? Without a doubt.

All this is secondary to the force of the computer. More than anything else, it is the engine that drives golf-equipment innovation. The concept of computer-aided design (CAD), the microprocessor-driven virtual-modeling tools, and the use of supercomputer-fueled finite-element analysis (showing where a club is working and where it's not), are vital to the leading innovators in golf today.

"We're able to design in ways that weren't even conceptually possible years ago," says David Llewellyn, manager of golf-club research and development for Mizuno. "We've compressed design iteration cycles 10-fold. Without CAD, it would be really difficult to take a 460cc driver head that's already bumping against all the limits and figure out a way to further optimize it. Frankly, you just couldn't do it."

The role of the computer in golf-equipment innovation today is about equivalent to the role of the ball in the game itself. For decades, up through the early 1990s, equipment design was a mixture of art and science, heavy on the craftsmanship. Through the mid-'90s, the use of parameter-driven, solid-modeling software, like Pro/Engineer and Unigraphics, ushered in a new era. "The change it's made has been immense," says John A. Solheim, chairman and CEO of Ping, who in the past 25 years has seen the company go from hand-filing and workbenches to supercomputers and finite-element analysis. "Sure, we had a learning curve. We had to take two steps backward to go one step forward. I guess it required a certain courage, but there was just too much benefit to it."

The original drawings for Ping's legendary Anser putter were made on an album sleeve. Today, the company uses a supercomputer in its designs.

To give you an idea of where we were, calculating something as central to driver design as clubhead weight might have been an all-day process for an engineer as little as a dozen years ago. Mizuno's Llewellyn remembers using sections of masking tape all over the surface area of a clay model, and then converting the tape's weight to the weight of stainless steel just to get an idea of the finished head's total weight. Today, that kind of data is instantly calculated by even the most rudimentary CAD programs.

It's no coincidence that as CAD began to develop throughout the 1990s, equipment design changed from a process being led and even ultimately controlled by craftsmen to one that is consummately driven by scientists. CAD's growing presence also led to an acceleration in innovation that has reached dizzying heights. A telling example: From 1993-'98, Callaway introduced four drivers. In 2007, the company launched four drivers in one week.

At TaylorMade, Benoit Vincent, chief technical officer, suggests that easily 500 products could be designed every year. "Does that mean we're using it primarily to launch products?" he says. "No. What we're now able to do is to iterate more often before we launch a product."

It's hard to explain the technological sophistication in play here. Such digital-design dexterity is not only the way leading companies operate, it's a way for smaller companies to compete. A decade ago, craftsmen would fly around the world to make sure a design looked right. Today the computer is the platform that allows big-time manufacturers and their foundries half a planet away to work 24 hours a day on any design. Many companies utilize CAD engineers based in Asia who communicate digitally with the U.S.-based design team, and some, like Nickent, have set up an R&D team based in China. CAD is a requirement, says Solheim, because golf-equipment design today "is as complex as the most complicated aerospace parts."

At one level, the computer screen is nothing more than a sophisticated cocktail napkin. But what the computer allows us to understand in the finest detail is how each element of a design might work. How precise? At Ping, engineers digitally map the engravings on a driver to see what role those indentations might play at impact.

"Virtual analysis enables us to change variables independently, which in the real world you can't do," says Jeff Colton, senior vice president of research and development at Callaway.

At Callaway (left), a digital lattice rig (part of a conceptual modeling design software program) allows design engineers to pull and push a design (in this case, the FT-i) in three dimensions. At TaylorMade, a computer directs a CNC milling machine to shape each of the subtle curves on a prototype version of the Tour Burner (right).

In short, it has encouraged imagining the incredible without fear of the costs of failure. On-screen, engineers can virtually model a design and then produce a live sample via "printers" that grow the club out of a wax-like resin. Then, the use of other rapid prototyping devices allow computer-controlled milling machines to yield hittable samples of some clubs in days, and robot-testing data can be dissected immediately with laptop-computer-based ball-flight-analysis devices. In some cases, an unsuccessful idea that might have taken six months to confirm 15 years ago can now be done in little more than a week. "Fail early, learn fast" is the mantra.