Video Transcriptions
HX Hot Golf Ball - About
HX Hot Golf Ball - About: The Callaway Golf HX Hot Golf Ball features our double-cover technology. It has a firm ionomer outer cover and a soft highly resilient HPF mantle. This ball is for that person who’s looking for the ultimate distance, low dispersion with great feel.
HX Hot Golf Ball Technology - Olin Browne
HX Hot Golf Ball Technology - Olin Browne: Golf Ball Technology. When Callaway 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 3-piece ball with a hard core, and it had performance characteristics unlike any other that I had ever played. In fact, I was under contract with another company. This ball impressed me so much that I approached them, and I said, “You know what? Callaway’s got a product and 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 Callaway 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. I think it’s the most solid ball in golf.
Making of a HX Hot Golf Ball
Making of a HX Hot Golf Ball: Most shots are hit with a golf ball. Every good shot is certainly hit with a golf ball. My name is Steve Ogg, and I’m the Vice President of Golf Ball Research and Development at Callaway 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, gives a good distance, keeps the ball in play, we’ve got those products. Starting with the 2-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 onto the 3-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 3-piece construction. But here you can adjust the mantel 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 4-piece golf balls. You have a dual core that’s the foundation for these Tour I Series golf balls, so you have two different concepts there that are embodied into a core: differential compression and inertia. We utilize both of those to create, I think, the best golf balls on the market. I like to think the technology is kind of the key differentiator when it comes to Callaway 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. 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 counter-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 polybutadiene rubber, the core formulation. After extrusion, we take the plugs and load them into a compression mold. They’re molded in a heated compression mold tool, and they’re made into a round core. That spherical core, depending on the product, is then ground in a blebar machine, centerless grinding, to be very concentric. When it’s a 4-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 onto the injection molding of either the cover or the mantel, depending on whether it is a 2-piece, 3-piece, or 4-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. As the plastic flows around 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 an injection-molded cover of thermoplastic ionomor, or whether it’s a rim cover, we then de-gate 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 balls move to the finish room, they’re 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 and the Tour IX, there are actually two coats of tinted urethane paint that go on top of the golf ball. Then the balls have a logo stamped on them, and they go to packaging. Then they go to the distribution warehouse and shipped out to our consumers.
