Articles

Knock-Offs Beware!

With look-a-like clubheads you get what you pay for!

Two of the things, as a clubmaker, I pride myself on is providing accurate information and high quality products.There is a lot of product out there and sometimes the quality is not all that it should be. Nowhere is this more evident than with clubheads.
With the recent introduction of the MALTBY PLAYABILITY FACTOR from the GolfWorks literally thousands of heads have been measured. How this is done will be the subject of a future article. There are many fitting factors in addition to head design that determine the best club for any individual, but the mass and dimensional properties of the head tell us a lot about how playable a properly fitted club will be – it is clear that a badly designed head can ruin the effort of the best club-fitting job.

One of our biggest concerns is the continuing distribution of blatant “knock-off” product. This gives the entire club making profession a black eye, not only because these heads are unethical “copies” of successful OEM designs, but because the quality of these heads can actually make them bad for a player’s game. Custom fitting a player and then putting him or her into bad quality knock-off heads is like getting fitted for a suit with sub-standard materials…. the low price doesn’t seem like such a good deal when you get sub-standard performance.

The GolfWorks put some of the more popular “Knock-off” clubheads to the test comparing them to the original models they pretend to be, measuring the face flatness, groove dimension, loft, lie, bore, bounce, and very importantly, the mass and dimensional properties that create playability (or the lack of). The findings were interesting to say the least.

Specifications such as loft, lie, bore depth and bounce tell us a lot about the quality of the manufacture of the club head. Groove dimensions and face flatness also tell us about the quality of the head.

One model measured was the tour model 3000, (a Taylor Made copy). The weight of the head was heavy and out of tolerance, the grooves were illegal and the center of gravity location was measured 8mm from the heel…which means you have to literally shank the shot to hit the shot in the COG. NOT GOOD.

The GolfWorks consistently found problems with the horizontal center of gravity location and the sole radius in all the models tested. The HCG locations were located towards the heel and the sole radius was off-center as well. As previously mentioned the over-all weights were suspect and over 50% of the heads tested were found to be heavy and thus would have failed the quality standards at the GolfWorks.
Sole angle was another specification that was examined. The System 3000 Tour model had a -1 degree (dig) bounce angle. The Synchon Soft Feel had 0 degree of bounce. The other models that were checked all had between 1-3 degrees of bounce. Bounce angle on irons is one of those specs you can look at and quickly know if the head is a good or bad design.

No legitimate designer of clubs would design a club with 0 or a negative degree of bounce. It simply makes no sense and only makes the club very difficult to play.
Speaking of Playability, it was very interesting to evaluate the mass and dimensional characteristics of the knock-off heads. One example is the Acer Wide sole (Callaway X16 copy). The actual Callaway X16 design is in the Ultra Game Improvement category and is one of the highest-rated OEM clubs the GolfWorks has evaluated. The Acer copy came in a full 266 Playability points below the actual x16 design, not what the buyer would suspect! Combine that with the non-centered COG location, the non-centered sole-radius, the heavier weight, and the shallow grooves you can see the copy would not perform anywhere near as well as the original design.

The quality of the material used and the treatment of the materials is another area that the GolfWorks pays attention to with club head designs. Properties such as tensile strength yield strength; elongation, hardness and density all determine the characteristics of the metal. How a metal is heat-treated will affect all the properties and determine the hardness and elongation (bendability) that is possible. With the knock-off clubheads the processes and heat-treating is always a little suspect. Heat-treating can be a costly process that adds to the cost…and with the knock-offs it is all about being cheap.

In a basic evaluation of bendability of the knock-offs there was a wide range of results. The Taylor Made 360 copy bent like butter and was far to soft. The Callaway X16 copy could not be bent nor could the Taylor Made series 3000-forged copy. "That’s right" the “hot forged” would not bend. What that tells us is the head is either carbon steel, not a soft heat-treated stainless steel, or the heat-treating was done to a point to make it so hard and brittle that it would break and never bend. Again this is more evidence of the type of product that is being passed on as a quality component.

Overall, the finish on the knock-offs was also poor quality. The painting in the cavities was sub-standard and the leading edge grinds were inconsistent. It is obvious that the buyer is NOT getting the same performance features or a better value than with OEM products or quality components assembled by a qualified clubmaker.

The point of this article is to expose KNOCK-OFFS for what they really are…CHEAP IMITATIONS.

Kirby Huestis. credit for this article and the basic contents are copyrighted by the GolfWorks.