Nike Golf Oven: Design Labs- 05.29.10
You’ve now seen the Nike Golf Oven Testing Facilities, and the awesome Putting Lab… i’d be remiss not to show you some of the fun machinery in the Nike Golf Oven Grind Shop, Machine Shop, Tour Shop, Engineering Labs, Durability Testing Labs and more! Personally, the manufacturing/prototyping/testing phases of industrial design have always fascinated me so ~ and there is some of the cutest iconography on the warning labels! So take a peek at fun machinery, labs, close ups into microscopes, prototypes and more on the next page!
This gizmo is what the USGA uses to test clubs on the spot… versus the one above that Nike Golf uses to literally shoot balls at all parts of the club head at various speeds and at various spots to measure the rate at which it bounces off…
So many things i wanted to use this scope to peek at things super up close, we were using it to look at grooves in some of the new golf club heads…
Greem machines used to measure and precisely customize any club… looking at the angle with which the head makes contact with the ground, the angle of the club, and the shaft height…
The propane tank just looked so pretty…
The obligatory cnc machine
Before and after look at prototypes… metal method putter heads in the early stages… cnc routing bits…
teeny cnc bits with cross section look at the method putter head… fun to see how the different materials are merged…
They even gave us a peek under the microscope to see just how tiny the CNC routing bit used to cut the grooves in the method putter faces are…
Nice oven logo on this one…
Before being ground down… they start out pretty basic…
Perhaps one of the most amazing parts, while commercial clubs aren’t fully manufactured here in the Grind Shop, every Nike Golf Athelete’s clubs are customized here, and at any given time, in addition to the set they are playing, there is a set in the tour vans ready to help them, and a set in the Grind Shop ~ all perfectly identical (and sometimes in the making on these trays!)
A look at the grind shop machinery…
I just loved this chopped off finger warning label…
Did they serve beer? I think I see one in the USGA Gizmo photo.
----- Peter Ligotti 16.06.10 15:34