Video Transcriptions
Big Bertha Golf Ball Technology - Olin Browne
Big Bertha Golf Ball Technology - Olin Browne: Golf ball technology – when Calloway came out with its golf ball, it was Rule 35. It was the first golf ball that they made, and I think it brought about a revolution in golf ball technology. It was not a wound ball. It was a three piece ball with a hard core, and it had performance characteristics unlike any other that I had every played. In fact, I was under contract with another company, and this ball impressed me so much that I approached them and I said, “You know what? Calloway’s got a product. I think I need to play that. I think it’s better for me and my career,” and it has been. The evolution of that golf ball technology has gotten us to the point where Calloway now builds the X tour ball with a hexagonal dimple feature. It’s not really a dimple. It started as a tubular lattice network with the hex balls, and it’s a revolutionary and innovative idea, and I think it’s the most solid ball in golf.
Callaway Big Bertha Golf Ball - Steve Ogg
Callaway Big Bertha Golf Ball - Steve Ogg Calloway Big Bertha Golf Ball is about distance and feel. It has a firm ionymer cover with a low compression, highly resilient core. It’s a great value for those golfers that are looking to maximize distance and reduce dispersion off the tee.
Making of a Big Bertha Golf Ball
Making of a Big Bertha Golf Ball: Most shots are hit with the golf balls. Every good shot is certainly hit with the golf ball. My name is Steve Ogg, and I’m the Vice President of Golf Ball Research and Development at Calloway Golf. Golf balls affect everything. They affect the accuracy, the dispersion, the distance, the feel, the control. Regardless of whether they’re just out to have fun and want a ball that’s a good value, good distance, keeps the ball in play, we’ve got those products. Starting with the two piece golf balls, the key there is balancing the cover with the core. Big Bertha is a really good example of that. It’s a very soft feeling golf ball with really good distance characteristics. As you move on to the three piece golf balls, there’s a lot more variables and there’s a lot more product variety that you can provide to the golfer with a three piece construction. But here, you can adjust the mantle and cover individually to give distance and control. Now if you do want the ultimate in performance and the ultimate in combination of feel, control, distance, and durability, that’s when you move up to our four piece golf balls. You have a dual core that’s the foundation for these two i-Series golf balls, so you have two different concepts there that are embodied into a core, differential compression and inertia, and we utilize both of those to create, I think, the best golf balls on the market. I like to think the technology is the key differentiator when it comes to Calloway versus the competition. The golf ball starts with the core. The core is the engine of the golf ball. The core is made up of synthetic rubber, and it starts out with cutting and mixing these materials. All these materials are very accurately weighed, and they’re mixed in an internal mixer. We have two different styles of mixers that we use. Once this material is thoroughly mixed, it’s sheeted on a two-roll mill. A two-roll mill, imagine two rotating cylinders that have a gap. It continues to mix the material, but it also gets it into a form that allows it to be extruded in an extruder. An extruder is designed to take a large mass of material and make plugs. Here’s an example of an extruded piece of polybutyldiene rubber, the core formulation. After extrusion, we take the plugs and we load them into a compression bowl, and they’re molded into heated, compression molds, cooled, and they’re made into a round core. That spherical core, depending on the product, is then ground in a [xx] center with grinding to be very concentric. When it’s a four piece golf ball, we actually do two series of compression molding. We’ll mold the inner core, then we’ll make two smaller plugs, they look like this but they’re smaller, that we use to mold the hemispherical shells of our dual core golf balls. Once you have the core, you move on to the injection molding of either the cover or the mantle, depending on whether it is a two-piece, three-piece, or four-piece golf ball. Injection molding involves insert molding this core, so you have pins that support the core, you have a mold that closes around that core, and then you have plastic that’s heated and is injected and flows around the core. As the plastic flows around the core, the pins are retracted to be flush with the outside of the cavity. In the case of our RIM golf balls, you actually use a process called reaction injection molding, or RIM, to injection mold a cover around the injection molded insert. The cavities that we use are machined to have the surface geometry that gives us the aerodynamic performance. Regardless of whether you have injection molded cover or a thermal plastic ionymer or whether it’s a RIM cover, you then degate the ball so that the material is removed, leaving a small amount of flash. Those balls are then moved to what we call a seam buffer, other people call it a milling machine, where you remove the flash around the equator of the golf ball. Once you’ve done that, typically the golf balls go through a prep process where they’re tumbled to remove any debris that’s on the golf ball and prepare the balls for finishing. Once the ball’s moved to the finish room, they are preheated prior to being sprayed with, once again, a two component urethane finish system. In the case of our premium golf balls like the Tour I or the Tour IX, there are actually two coats of tinted urethane that go on top of the golf ball. And then the balls have a logo stamped on them and they go to packaging, and they go the distribution warehouse and they’re shipped out to our consumers.
