INSIDE LOOK! Wilson Golf R&D Center (PART 1)

Let’s Start The Tour!

If you’re a golfer and wake up in mid-April to find snow on the ground, chances are that you’re going to be pretty salty. Although being able to do some GolfSpy intel at the Wilson Golf Innovation Center got rid of that saltiness real quick.  I showed up at Wilson’s Schiller Park, IL location at 9am and met Steve Junkroski, the manager of Wilson’s Special Order Department.

The first thing we did was tour the facilities. In the main room, there are many desks and lots of golf testing machines – golf ball compression, MOI, COR, etc. For an equipment junkie like me, it was awesome. While we toured the area, I also had the opportunity to meet the gentleman who handles Wilson’s tennis pros. Admittedly, I know very little about tennis, but it was very cool, nonetheless, to go inside the tennis “tour van” and see all of the racquets that were being prepared for the Wilson tennis pros.

Rapid Prototypes

The last thing that we looked at in this first room was a 3D printer. The machine is about six feet tall and a couple of feet wide and deep and it creates plastic models from CAD files in about twelve hours. Steve talked to me about how helpful this is in the design process: the R&D teams are able to use this technology to create four or five different variations on a new product to show other departments so that they can get feedback. He said that this has helped them to increase the speed of the design process tremendously. You can see some examples of this in the pictures, from a driver head to an iron to a full sized tennis racquet.

Wilson – Custom Order Department

From there, we moved on to the custom order department. For someone who loves equipment and club building, it was hard to know what to look at first. There were boxes of heads and shafts, giant grinding machines, digital Mitchell Loft & Lie Machine, and much much more. One of the coolest things in the area was an old school loft and lie machine (pictured below). For clubs that can’t be bent on a Mitchell, they lock the clubs into a vice and hit them with a mallet, then check the specs and repeat until the club meets the customer’s requirements. In this area I was also able to see some wedges and irons that were being ground for Wilson Staff players like Ricky Barnes and an iron set for Mike Small that had the leading edge blunted.

One Impressive File Cabinet!

For those who love the history of the game, the next stop on the tour was the most impressive. Steve showed me a row of file cabinets labeled “Staff Members/VIPs” that held the specs of clubs that Wilson had built for Staff Members and other celebrities or important people dating all the way back to the 1960’s. The names in these files are basically a who’s who of golf: Sam Snead, Hale Irwin, Chick Evans, Tom Watson, Vijay Singh…and I just opened a couple of drawers. There are also some impressive VIPs: presidents, coaches, and athletes from many other sports.

Prototypes, Prototypes and more Prototypes…

We continued our tour with a look at the prototyping area. Our first stop was a CNC mill where a Wilson employee was hard at work milling a putter, which I was asked not to photograph. I did take a couple pictures of the nearby work table which had plastic and metal models of the current Wilson Vizor putter. Also in this area was a pair of machines for creating prototype golf balls and more testing equipment.

One of the cooler machines, in my opinion, was a golf ball durability tester. This machine fires golf balls at a steel plate to simulate six years’ worth of strikes to see how the ball holds up. While we were touring this area, we also came across a number of racks of classic Wilson clubs. Some of the highlights were “The Whale” driver and some classic Wilson Staff sand wedges.

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