How do manufacturers assemble standard iron sets?

[e-man]

Here's my question. When a manufacturer puts together a set of standard irons to ship to a store, how do they put together the set? Do they have bins of assembled 4, 5, 6, etc., irons and just pull one club from each bin and call it a set? Again, I'm talking about standard off the rack sets here and not custom orders.

[braincramp52]

Watch a video of the Ping factory. It's a great watch

[e-man]

I assume Ping may do things differently than other big manufacturers. Do they assemble sets one by one? In other words, the club builder takes 8 heads, 8 shafts, glues them, grips them, etc.?

[Payton1020]

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[Double Gee]

In the case of TaylorMade, and in my case, they assemble them badly!

 

A few years back I had a session at a demo day and wanted the Burner 2.0.

Standard graphite shafts 4 to PW. I waited the allotted time and they turn up all shiny and new.

I struggled to get the 5 iron in the air and the 8 iron felt 'funny'. Spoke to my pro and he put it down to me getting used to a new set of clubs.

I persevered but around 61 days later the head of the 8 iron fell off. On closer inspection, 2 other clubs appeared to have hozel issues.

TaylorMade were contacted and they said as the clubs were over 60 days in use that the problem wasn't their issue.

The clubs were dis-assembled, and ALL of them were found to have various amounts of glue inside the tip ends of the shafts. Some had different colours of glue...in other words, the shafts were second hand!!

The 5 iron had glue packed inside to about 3 inches...no wonder I could never hit it.

2 other heads were ready too fly off.

 

TaylorMade were not interested, awful rubbish, garbage company that they are.

 

First set of brand new clubs !

 

Never ever bought from that crap company since

[DaveMac]

Here is an article on the Mizuno assembly factory just a few miles away. There is a video at the end of the page.

 

http://www.golfalot.com/equipment-news/mizuno-custom-fit-irons-factory-cumbernauld-tour-3414.aspx

 

It has to be said, while the process is slick with reasonably tight tolerances, it still doesn’t match the attention to detail that a passionate individual club builder offers.

[ATAlxndr]

If you can find it, watch the episode of Undercover Boss on Taylormade. Mark King visits an assembly plant and learns how to do it.

[TomWishon]

Here's my question. When a manufacturer puts together a set of standard irons to ship to a store, how do they put together the set? Do they have bins of assembled 4, 5, 6, etc., irons and just pull one club from each bin and call it a set? Again, I'm talking about standard off the rack sets here and not custom orders.

 

Every clubhead production factory manufactures and ships the heads by number. In other words, all the #4's are made together then boxed together so the carton only has #4 iron heads in it. Same for every other head number in a set.

 

Sets of irons are only made when the assembly operation grabs one of each number to form the set. Some companies will sort the heads within each number by weight since there is always a +/- tolerance for head weight for every clubhead ever made. In that case if the assembler knows he needs heads that are -2g from the spec weight for each head, he grabs each head number one at a time from the bins that have each head number in the sorted weight range.

 

After that the accuracy of the assembly of a set depends on the company. There are a lot of different sorting and checking operations that can be done. Heads can be checked for loft and lie and tweaked to get them all on spec rather than just within the normal +/-1* tolerance. Shafts and grips can be weight sorted. Once the shafts are tip trimmed they can be dry installed and tweaked to check for proper sequence of stiffness from club to club. There are a lot of ways to tweak sets when they are made for higher levels of accuracy and club to club consistency. Some do these, some don't and you never know unless you measure a lot of specs on every club in a set.