Dave: First trip over there was 1989 because Apollo and their then head of R&D, Graeme Horwood, who now heads up R&D for TT, had agreed to let me use what at that time was state-of-the-art shaft testing equipment for doing the beginning of the work that resulted in that shaft book which was finished in 1991. Back then they had the best management team I think has ever been assembled in a golf company because they were all smart, hard-working as heck, but knew how to have fun and not take themselves too seriously in the process. Second trip over was when I had the chance to really "get inside" the mfg process. That's when I had the chance to go visit their seamless tubing supplier and still to this day, I believe that it was the single most fascinating trip to a production facility that I have ever made. The start of the seamless tubing process involved piercing a hole down the length of a 12" diameter x 5 foot long "log" of steel. It was one of those processes that when you see it done, you literally cannot believe what was just accomplished. I bet I stood there over the piercing station for an hour watching this ram with a bullet shaped end push its way through orange/white hot log after log. And the part that really was amazing was that since this was piercing and not drilling, once the hole was pushed through, the original 5' long log "grew" to about 8 feet long because that material being pushed out of the way to form the hole had to go somewhere!! It was like, "wait a minute, wasn't that thing a lot shorter when it started?" It was amazing, truly amazing. I know I literally drove the company's associate nuts who was assigned to keep me under reins that day by not wanting to leave!!
TOM -----Original Message----- From: Dave Tutelman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, October 13, 2003 6:09 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: ShopTalk: Residual Bend N plane - Steel Shafts At 11:43 AM 10/13/03 -0600, Tom Wishon wrote: >RK: >What you say is true and it is interesting. I remember when I was able >to spend a fair amount of time on the production floor with Apollo a >number of years ago, we were talking about seamless vs welded tubing. >Their engineers confided that while they were glad that the market at >that time seemed to view seamless tubing as being more accurate for >shaft making because of the little changes in the welded tubes from the >actual welding and heat treatment and material properties as you >mentioned, they were glad that the industry did not know the little >"problems" that they faced daily with working with seamless tubing. >They admitted that piercing and drawing the seamless blanks was never as >accurate on wall thickness as was welding a coiled strip. So while they >did not have the little changes in the tube from the welding, TT and RP >did not have the wall thickness problems to deal with that Apollo did. Tom, Very interesting, but not new information. I first found out years ago that the Apollo "seamless" marketing pitch was overhype, from the 1992 book, "The Modern Guide to Shaft Fitting". Now let me see -- who wrote that book anyway? Oh yeah! Tom Wishon and Jeff Summitt. Hmmm! Chart 4-3 from that book says it very explicitly. The chart is a "rotational comparison of frequency"; nobody used the word "spine" back then. The seamless steel Apollo shafts were not quite as good as the welded steel True Temper shafts -- though none of the samples from either company were over 3cpm difference. So was that when you visited Apollo? Cheers! DaveT
