What Happens Inside a Golf Ball Factory?

How is a golf ball made? I headed to the TaylorMade golf ball plant in Liberty, North Carolina, to find out how a golf ball goes from raw materials to the final TaylorMade TP5 golf ball.

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Hi, I’m Hannah Holden; welcome to my channel!

I am a +2 golfer from Leeds, England.

This YouTube channel aims to help you improve your golf by offering up-to-date reviews on the latest golf equipment, stats on how scratch golfers shoot low scores, and course vlogs to help improve your course management.

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A golf ball may look a lot more simple than a driver or an iron that you see on display but actually when it comes to the technology and building these is probably one of the most complicated items that’s in your golf bag so what exactly is involved and how do we

Develop and make a new golf ball we’ve been to the tail made headquarters in carsbad and now we’re here at the Liberty ball plant to show you the full spectrum of what goes on behind the scenes with golf balls We’re at the T golf B plan out here in Liberty very excited about to see all the finishing processes for the tp5 and tp5x overall we’re here with Scott can you talk us a little bit through what y absolutely yeah Scott Austin been with tailor made for 17 years custom logo

Operations we’re doing here so everything that has to do with the the pick process the strip process my symbol my number all that good stuff so all that rolls up and which that’s the big growth area for us so we’re really excited about that so if you’re into

Your colored pent golf balls this is going to be a treat for you because some of the stuff in here is mind it’s crazy so this is our manual cooling room we’ve nicknamed it the nursery because it’s full of little baby golf balls so this is the mantled core so we talked about

It in the tour before that you have the rubber compression molded core and the injection molded layers of serum that go over the top of it so these are basically the the middle cars that are getting ready to go and get that final euro thing C correct so we hold these at

A certain temperature for a certain amount of time in order to make sure when we cast it it’s the proper size we want when it finishes yeah so what you can’t feel is it’s pretty cold in there what actually is the temperature uh it’s around 56° F right now so you guys can

Convert that but quick M quick M nice and cool so we’re now here with the covering what is happening here how how does this get on the golf ball so what happens here is that core comes into the line and our dimpled cavities are Imagine like a muffin pan that’s dimpled

Okay so we put a shot of urethane in each cavity kind of like putting batter in your muffin pan and then I’m taking that mantle and I know the size of it I press it into a certain depth and make a half a ball at a time so I make the

Bottom half flip make the top half which is now the bottom right and it comes out looking like Saturn with a ring around it so so we take that ring off in the next operation and that’s how we make the correct OD of the golf ball and so

The front robot here is doing an unload process that’s the biggest one it has the heaviest payload the next robot is going through mold spray as I’m loading the mold onto the line then it gets dispensed inserted closed comes back around and you see a little bit of the

Third robot in the back what he’s doing is that’s like a traffic cop it makes sure that the traffic is Flowing that there’s no traffic jams or any wrecks and if so it’s like GPS you can Meander around the wreck or he can actually remove the balls from the oven and make

Sure they’re not getting overheated while the wreck is cleared and then it can put them back on the line like a Vegas car dealer and smooth the line back out for flow again so how long would it take for when a call goes into the sty this for it to be kind of

Finished and ready to go to the next stage of the process so the physical lap around the machine is anywhere from between 12 and 15 minutes for the work piece carrier of the number of balls in it but then the curing process of the ball can take a number of hours before

It is firm enough to go to the next process the material goes from very flimsy to super tough in a matter of hours so what exactly is going on here so what’s happening now is remember I told you the ball looks like Saturn it’s got a ring around it right like Beyonce

So what we’re doing is we’re locating the ball in this machine it’s called a buffing machine so all of our competitors anybody’s making golf ball is using some form of a buffing machine whether you’re making a siring two-piece ball you’ll have Gates like little fingers sticking out or if you’re

Casting a ball you’ll have a continuous ring around the ball that is your seam but it’s so thin once you cut it and buff it off it looks seamless because you’re hiding the seam in The dimple pattern so it is locating making sure I get the equator lined up and I’m cutting

That and buffing it round so I have a perfectly round ball when I leave without damaging the dimble pattern which is your aerodynamic flight it’s really weird seeing a completely PL white golf ball with nothing on it right and so that’s the next step is remember

The mole release we put on to get the muffins out of the pan now it still has mole release on it so it’s very slick at this point so if you go to grab that ball it’s it’ll almost slide out of your hands so the process after that is where

I take that mole release off and prepare it for painting which it’ll be really white after painting so we’ve seen the thing come on we’ve seen it been book it’s been painted something interesting’s happening here this is where it becomes a p golf ball if that’s the way it was

Correct what what is this Machinery look very high tech how how hard is it to develop this very this has taken a number of years to do this because up to this point in our plant we’ve mainly got three golf balls okay you’ve got a white coated T response tb5 tv5x remember the

Nursery I had the three different colors now they’ve all been coated and white painted but they’re all blank what we’ll do here is this is actually three printing machines put in one so when we talk about a white stock ball it is tailormade number side stamp tailor made

Number that’s what we call a white stock ball that could be done in about a third of this machine so what we do here is we keep rolling the ball and stamping on different faces of a cube if you will imagine stamping a cube so I would go

Stamp rotate stamp rotate till I’m all the way around then I cure that flip it and do sides five and six so yeah it’s a lot it looks like it’s just sitting there running and running and running but every station has a little bit of the puzzle of the artwork so whatever

Pattern we’re doing if it’s a three color then each process is stamping a third of that color as it goes this is the final process that they’re inspecting before we go to pack out okay so they’re watching them doing an audit check on these looking for cosmetic

Defects that would not pass a cosmetic standard we have okay we’re looking to make sure that everything is filled in it’s legible there’s no lines bleeding it’s got the correct number it’s got the correct stamp all that fun stuff on it and then how often do you actually pull

Balls out you’re probably about uh a percent or two and then those will still live on as a practice ball you might have heard in an earlier tour so a practice ball is a cosmetic downgrade that doesn’t affect performance so if a ball has a hole in it say or someone’s

Hair sticking out of it right that is a performance related defect and that ball is going to be scrap so it’s going to be damaged enough that you cannot use it as a golf ball right and it’s not available for the public but if it’s just got a

Small Nick in it or something like on the printing that it says tailor mad instead of tailor m then that’ll be a practice ball so then it goes to another operation and gets stamped practice so practice takes you out of USGA listings and everything else so you can’t play a practice ball in

Like a usgaa or RNA competition because it says all right something something knocked that ball out of being perfect it could be a slight size issue could be a slight weight issue but that’s how we do that but these look good and they’re going to

Move on to go into sleeves and go into d I’ve been with a company 17 years and it went from where you’re doing 95% white ball to now you’re roughly 5050 of a white ball versus a a ball that is a visual technology so that’s how much has

Changed and and over the years it’s been like it’s just it’s just converged on where you’re right at 50/50 now of a ball with some sort of decoration other than stock yeah so you’ve got we’re leaning on a Range Rover right now okay so by the time you have market pricing

On this one yeah this is a nice Range Rover right here so this is a pallet of tp5 ready to go to a retailer near you so they’ve fully been packaged in dozens remember you saw the packing line earlier so we go 1 two 3 five on a five

Piece ball what happened to the four right people always said I want fours well you can go to tatag off.com and still buy fours but we stopped putting fours in dozens mainly because as we launched a global product years ago the four in Asia is very similar to the word

For death so they equated the number four as the death ball so yeah they didn’t like that one Ball’s out so right so they would took the fours out so we started back then making 0123 so the tour response strike and stock ball will be 0123 in a dozen and the five piece

Balls will be 1 2 3 five so this will get one more final audit so our QC operator will will come through and randomly pick boxes open them up check to make sure the right numbers in the right box the right box is in the right

Box all that fun stuff QC stamp it stretch wrap it and it’ll go off to our distribution center and head to a golf course near you so now you’ve seen the full process and just how intricate it is to get to your final golf ball maybe

You’ll be a little bit more careful on the cost and not lose them quite as easily