Golfweek’s David Dusek takes you on a tour of the TaylorMade golf ball factory in Liberty, South Carolina.
For more golf news: https://golfweek.usatoday.com
Part of the USA Today Network: https://www.usatoday.com
Hi I’m David Duc with golfweek golfweek.com as well as USA Today sports I’m here with my buddy Scott Austin and we are here in Liberty South Carolina at the tailor made golf ball Factory and you’re going to give me a tour why don’t we uh head inside where it’s a little
Bit warmer show me around a little bit let’s see what we see let’s go cool Scott how long you been working here in this Factory well actually we built this Factory in 2013 I got started in golf ball in 2006 so yeah 10 years here 17 years total gotcha so about how
Many people are working here at this point so we’re right at 300 now okay we first moved here in 2013 it was about 80 wow yeah okay so I’m looking here what I presume Scott is at a whole bunch of cores and mantels you are presuming
Right so this is the mantle core that we get out of our two Asian plants so this is the three constructions we’re making right now so T respon is the Green Apple color the gray is the 5x and the blue is the TV5 and it sounds so simple but
Obviously and things are shipped and getting moved around I can see that there are barcodes and different codes on there but the colors also tell you what you’re working with exactly the color is the first thing you can see cuz it’s kind of kind of funny we strategically make it for even people
That are color blind so you can tell the difference but that is the first idea that hey I know which ball type this is but then you’re right the barcode tells you where When what when it was primed how long it’s been in there everything okay so this product here comes over
From your Asian factors how long does it take to actually get over there I mean you got some very sophisticated factories over there that are making that product how do you actually get it over here to South Carolina well if you’re on boat it’s about 6 weeks I mean
If it’s really if it’s really critical you you can Airship it yeah but it’s kind of funny cuz we monitor though from when it was made at the plant all the way through production however long it takes to get here we know size weight and speed where it’s going to be but one
Of the amazing things about this is sort of like you get this blend of manufacturing and then back over on the other side of the country in Carl Bell you get engineers and designers who are working at actually making golf balls I would imagine there has to be a pretty
High level of communication between you guys because they can dream up whatever they want but you guys have to be able to tell them like yeah we can make that we’ve got the technology and all these Engineers here so how much do you talk back and forth with the folks on the
West coast too much no I mean seriously now it’s it’s daily if not hourly cuz what happens is you’re right in the lab they’re creating the most perfect golf ball they’re getting feedback from Colin and Rory saying if you could only get me 200 more RPM on this shot here they so
They’ll design the golf ball right based on history and based on our performance through the years and they’ll say this is where we want it to be and we’ll have to make that Manel overseas to those specs bring it in continue that spec y then as we approach the lines here we
Put the cover on all that stuff is continually measured size weight and speed throughout the whole process to make sure we make the most consistent highest performing ball possible now when a person’s at home and they’re maybe making dinner and a recipe calls for a teaspoon of this half a cup of
That give me some measure and give people who may not be aware some measure of the scale and how fine a measurements some of the things like when you’re making a year cover on a tp5 tp5x ball how thin are we talking about when we get into that urethane cover sure so the
Tp5x is our thinnest cover the tour response is right there on it too it’s 20,000 of an inch thick that’s the thinnest urethane cover out there to my knowledge especially cashier things so 20,000 is going to be you know you and I don’t have a lot of hair left it’s going
To say don’t go there man come on it’s going to be probably 10 or 11 hairs okay thick and then it’s funny that is the total thickness of the cover so if I scallop out the dimple that is 11 or so thousands deep so the skin of the bottom
Of the dimple is half that 20,000 it is just wafer thin right you can see through it it’s it’s really amazing so for people who may not understand the process of using cast urethane there’s a couple different kinds of urethane you can buy urethane in pellets or in
Chopped up pieces melt it down go ahead and make a golf ball you guys do it differently explain to me how you do it so cast your thing is where I have a died muffin pan if you will if you really want to lay it down okay a Dipple
Muffin pan and my batter is my urethane so I’m putting a shot of urethane in the bottom of that dimpled muffin pan and I’m pushing in that mantled core and it plumes up around the side and makes an impression that’s half of that golf ball
I do the same thing on the other side in a different piece of timing put those together and I’m making that two halves at a time and you’re basically going to heat that up put it under some level of pressure and then allow it to cool cuz
You got to be able to pop that that cake out of the spring form pan and I got to have that Pam in my muffin pan so they’ll pop out right so there’s a certain amount of mole release that lets those balls come out without being deformed right everybody’s had the the
Muffin that gets stuck and comes all to pieces right we don’t want that to happen with golf balls so once it comes out there’s a little bit of a ring around it where those two two halves knitted together that makes the ring around it that’s almost like a a spew
Ring or a leftover waist ring then that has got to be cut down to make it perfectly round again got and that’s what these machines do here so these are the buffing machines that take that ball that takes that excess urethane around that half that’s where it’s put together
At the equator trims that true and Sands it down and makes it perfect round okay so now explain to me how you get the paint on because once you get the excess material the urethane off the golf ball you’ve essentially got a golf ball absolutely it looks like a golf
Ball right but it’s not something that people would up a dozen box and play with you’ve got to apply a paint you’ve also got to add some other cover so walk me through what the rest of remember the Pam and the muffin pan right that Pam is
Still on the ball okay so first I got to get that off so paint does not like mold release so we go through a prep process where I thoroughly clean the ball and open up all those little urethane pores kind of like exfoliating your skin right
So I want to open that up so my paint gets the best adhesion mechanically and chemically and holds on to it cuz you don’t want to hit a ball on the paint coming comes off right no absolutely not and the paint’s got to move with it so
As the urethane moves the paint has a flex agent in as well okay so once that ball is prep then I paint it with like an automotive paint spray process base coat clear coat like you’re doing a an automotive bumper if you will then I have a white coated ball looks like a
Golf ball with no printing on it okay is there a glossy finish to it at that point or is that sort of like a matte sort of finished looking looking W golf ball at that point another good question after cleaning it is a matte finish but
Then I’ll go like a semigloss and a full gloss with those two coats yep then that gloss coat is ready to accept any of these printing processes be it pad or digital for the next operation of visual technology then it is clear coded after that to seal in all that goodness right
And give you the best performing golf ball out there as far as UV resistance moisture resistance grass stain resistance cart path resistance in your case you know so so obviously visual technologies have become a huge part of what Taylor m is doing in the golf industry absolutely talk to me a little
Bit about how visual Technologies and the application of actually making the stuff has changed how do you guys create some of the things like the my symbol program and the the stripe program and such how how do you do it well back back in 06 when I started it was white ball
Right and that was 95% you had a little bit of custom logo you want a Packers logo something on the side you could do that but then it got to where you know the tour players saying hey it’d be cool to get my own number something that a
Lot of other companies didn’t do and that evolved into the my number then from my number we’re like well what if you did this what if you did this and only recently has the usgaa opened it up to where then I can do anything underneath the name and you don’t even
Have to technically have a number on the golf ball remember right it doesn’t doesn’t matter it can be DD instead of the number right I like where you’re going with this yeah I was going to say stud but anyway as far as the usgaa until they opened that up we couldn’t
Even color the name different it had to be like black name Taylor Made had to be a number or something on the the keyboard now as far as the side stamp that still holds true the side stamp still has to be registered black has to be something on an a keyboard right yep
But yeah so what that did is that really made us open up the way we print because we could do a lot of different things we had a great way of just doing numbers only but then the numbers were limited to two digits now I can put a zip code
On the ball got it doesn’t matter so you guys have put a lot of work and spent a lot of money in technology and researching how you actually print on a golf ball which I think a lot of people probably underappreciate because they think well you can just put whatever you
Want on there it’s it’s not that it’s not simple to print on a sphere basically and then make sure that the orientation of the numbers and the letters and the symbols is every way it needs to be because golfers are finicky like things don’t line up they don’t
Want to see it so what have you guys done to try and make that happen well in performance because there’s companies out there that’ll take our golf ball and print stuff on it but then how long does it last does it affect flight so all of ours is about about performance
Everything we do has performance in mind because all of this stuff is under the clear coat so nothing is on top of the clear coat that would affect flight in any of these instances so we have to do something as far as inks remember we talking about chemistry we have to have
An ink that is compatible that can be on top of the white Under the clear that type of thing and then it can stand a few hundred hits before you lose it right or before you’re tired of that golf ball and blame a bogey on it or
Something so that’s how it evolved and then all the colors of the rainbow right cuz it used to be where oh I can only do black or red well now the colors are anything you want them to be gotcha okay so once the golf balls have gotten all
Their paint they’ve gotten their clear coat everything is finished you’ve got final product we’ve got some big bins of a whole bunch of golf balls help you get in one of them yeah right I mean so how do you get these into packages and then off either to Pro Shops or to Consumers
Good question cuz there’s about 15,000 golf balls in here and these are all look these are all number threes so we want to match them up to to a set so long before my time and maybe before your time they’ve been going four different numbers in a dozen right yep
And it was 1 2 3 4 for the longest time so we stopped doing fours back in like 08 we figured out four is the very close to the Asian word for Death In some cultures nobody wants the death ball so then we went 1 2 35 with starting with
Pent we’ve been 1 2 35 ever since on a five piece and zero one two three on a three piece or below so what happens is now I’ll put four of these row packs as we call it up on these stands and they will separate 1 2 3 5 so I got four
Tracks going up that are 1 2 35 down the tubes into their own sleeve gotcha perfect listen Scott it’s been really cool from seeing how golf balls are basically manufactured how they’re produced how they go out the door yeah man really really cool stuff thanks a lot for appreciate you guys thanks for
Everything thank you guys
