| In the 1980s, there were huge improvements made in golf
club design and construction. Most of those improvements increased
both forgiveness and distance. The object of the game is to
hit straighter and farther, so golf clubs designed to do that
are called Game Improvement golf clubs. The primary
characteristics of game improvement clubs are perimeter weighting,
large sweet spot and low center of gravity design.
However, there actually are golf clubs which are not designed as game improvement golf clubs. Those are used by professional golfers who always hit the ball straight. If we could always hit the ball straight, we wouldn't care about forgiveness either. But hey, we have day jobs and other things that take up our time, so we need every advantage we can get for the hours we have left to play golf.
Perimeter Weighting
Perimeter weighting means that the weight of the golf club head is positioned around the perimeter of the golf club instead of at the center. As we said above, if you always hit the ball dead center perfect, you would want a small sweet spot and no perimeter weighting so you could put as much physical mass directly behind the impact point of the ball. This would make a very long shot. However, if you are off, even if just a millimeter, your shot will go astray. We don't make clubs that do that. By perimeter weighting golf clubs, we maximize forgiveness.
Large Sweet Spot
A large sweet spot is generally created by perimeter weighting design. The sweet spot is the optimum place to make contact with the ball. The larger the sweet spot, the greater room for swing error. But designing for the largest sweet spot can leave less room to correct other common swing errors. Perimeter weighting can be shifted to cure toe-miss-hits and to help get the ball up in the air.
For example, certain irons designs are heavily toe-weighted,
meaning the weight of the club is heavier at the toe of
the club head, to decrease club twisting from severe miss-hits
off the toe of the golf club. Ping Golf is most famous for
this in their designs for the Ping Zing. This idea cures
one very important problem — toe hits and twisted shots,
but may decrease the overall size of the sweet spot. Increased
toe-weighting can stress the shaft and increase golf shaft
breakage. There is a fine balance in club design between
doing a good thing and doing too much of a good thing.
Another example of using perimeter weighting to solve a
problem is the low center of gravity designs of Callaway
Golf. Callaway Golf iron designs tend to shift weight to
solve the problem of getting the ball up in the air, but
may decrease the sweet spot size.
Low Center of Gravity
Recently, low center of gravity has become a favored design
concept. This means shifting weight to the bottom of the
club to increase the ability to hit the ball up into the
air. If you don't have a problem getting the golf ball off
the ground, then it should be less important to you. It
you have a big problem in this area then it would matter
a lot. Golf clubs with tungsten inserts focus on LCG, because
tungsten is heavier than steel and allows the club to have
even more weight where it counts. | 