In competitive golf, scoring is everything. Ask any tour pro and they’ll tell you that to go low, you have to excel around the green, in the short game.
For reliable short game performance, you need two things – spin for control and responsive feel to dial in your sense of touch. This is why we use cast urethane elastomers as the cover systems in Pro V1, Pro V1x and AVX. Urethane is a soft, synthetic polymer. It performs well around the green because, even on short shots, it gives and flexes at impact with the club. When the cover flexes, more of the cover material comes in contact with the club face, increasing the amount of interaction between the two surfaces. The greater the interaction, the more spin you can create. Spin is the element that gives a skilled golfer the ability to make the ball check up on the green and stop near the hole with precision.
Titleist Pro V1, Pro V1x and AVX all utilize a cover casting process to create the thermoset urethane cover. This proprietary process allows us to create a urethane formulation that is incredibly soft and pliable, but also very tough – a highly desirable combination for a golf ball cover. Our process involves mixing two separate components together right on the production floor, just before application. You can think of this like an epoxy formula that has an “A” and “B” component. As the two parts are mixed, a chemical reaction begins. Unlike thermoplastic urethane (which can be melted down and remolded again), once the thermoset material is cured, it cannot be undone.
In our cover casting operation, we start by taking the cased cores for Pro V1, Pro V1x and AVX and coat them with an adhesive compound to ensure that a strong bond is formed between the ionomer material of the casing layer and the urethane material of the cover. The cased cores are fed onto the automated urethane casting line. On this assembly line, the thermoset liquid urethane is mixed and dispensed into cavities, which are precision-machined by Titleist Advanced Tooling operations. The inner surfaces of these cavities will form the appropriate dimple pattern into the golf ball cover.
After the mold has been filled and the case core has been centered, the second half of the mold is mated with the first half. The two halves are bolted together and the cover material is allowed to cure at an elevated temperature then cooled, producing a finished urethane cover.
The quality we achieve using this method results in the highest-performing urethane covers in the game, ultimately providing the consistency, high spin and responsive soft feel that you need in order to control your shots into and around the green.
