Printed Putters

stockdam

I watched a brief video yesterday from Ping about printing 3D putter heads. They were using metal and not plastic. It's an interesting concept but I don't think it will catch on for various reasons.

Firstly making one-off designs is expensive and therefore the selling price would need to be high. Much better to mass produce. Otherwise if you want to buy low volume then you are going to have to pay for the design costs.

The design files would need to be very closely guarded otherwise once leaked anyone could copy the design exactly. In theory they could copy without the design files by cutting the head into sections, take measurements and then put the data into a CAD model. I suppose you could do this anyway with a head made by traditional methods.

What may happen is that you could buy a standard design but customise it in various predefined ways. Some manufacturers do this for running shoes etc already.

Maybe someday the price of 3D printing may come down to the price of making a mass produced product and you'll be able to order from a catalog of designs. It may open up opportunities for individual designers to compete with huge companies but the one problem will always be protecting the digital data; once this gets copied then every Tom, Dick and Harry will copy your design.

So would you be interested in paying a bit more for a custom design or do you think there are enough designs to chose amongst already.

Low volume may not be more expensive if all of the marketing, corporate overheads and shareholder dividends don't have to be paid.

slave1

You'd be amazed what's already being mass produced from once off 3d designs, I know of a company pumping 240k unique 3D per annum per line at the minute, albeit plastics it's still huge numbers...