Fernando H. Green Blog: EXPOSED: Peek Inside 9 of the Hottest Drivers in Golf

Tuesday, August 2, 2016

EXPOSED: Peek Inside 9 of the Hottest Drivers in Golf

It's What's on the Inside That Counts

While you can't actually see performance, or even center of gravity locations, frankly, it's just kinda cool to peel back the hood (or the crown) and take a look inside a driver. Today we're giving you a chance to do just that in the most literal sense possible.

Featured below are 9 of the top selling drivers of 2016. The crowns are off, the insides exposed. It's your chance to look around and see what's really going on under the lid.

What to look for

Here are a few things to consider as you look through the photos - and remember, you can click on any image to view the larger version:

Internal Structures - Structures are present to support face technologies like Callaway's R*MOTO and TaylorMade's Inverted Cone. A significant amount of structure is necessary to enable movable weight systems. Structure is required to support adjustable hosel designs, and sometimes elaborate ribbed structures are used for acoustic tuning purposes (most commonly in composite models).

Face Welds - many of you are aware, like the crown, a driver's face is a separate piece that must be welded, brazed, or otherwise attached to the body. Some manufacturers and models, as you'll see, have cleaner welds than others.

Hot Melt (the blob of goo you see in some of the heads) - Holt melt was fairly common in the days of bonded hosels where it was used to catch any bits of epoxy or other debris that might come loose and would otherwise have rattled around in the head. Hot melt is still used for that purpose, but it's also used to help heads make weight if they come up a little light. Finally hot melt is used to tune the acoustics in otherwise unpleasant sounding heads.

While hot melt can serve many purposes, its downside is that it's hard to control exactly where it ends up, and that can lead to inconsistent mass properties (CG location) from sample to sample.

Please Note:

The metal shavings shown stuck to the hot melt in the Callaway Great Big Bertha and PING G heads show below are byproducts of crown removal. When you cut metal, shavings get left behind. While these heads do contain hot melt, they don't actually contain metal shavings.
Not all of the titanium crowns were cut in exactly the same place, material lost to cutting may vary, and of course heads are different sizes and shapes. For all of those reasons, crown weights should be treated as approximations.

Let's take a truly inside look at some of the most popular driver designs on the market right now.