You may or may not remember that ad of a rental car company in the United States that basically said, "When you're number 2, you try harder."
Cobra Golf leads a bunch of golf equipment companies that are a skoosh behind the bigs (Callaway, TaylorMade and Titleist) and to Cobra's credit, they are trying as hard as they can to close the gap. Cobra has embraced technology and is using as much of it as they can to produce some of the most innovative golf clubs on the market today.
It started with the milled face on their drivers, progressed to Metal Injection Molding for their wedges and now the Cobra King Tour irons and now in the boldest of their moves, have partnered with Hewlett Packard and Parmatech to produce the first 3D printed putter to hit the market, the limited edition King Supersport-35 putter.
3D printing is arguably the most exciting development in the industrial world. It not only allows for rapid prototyping but can be adapted to produce everything from houses to body parts. This is blue sky technology on the grandest scale.
Basically, 3D printing is an additive process. Material is added in minute layers to produce an item as opposed to traditional tool-based production techniques that start with a block of material and continuously remove material until the desired product is realized.
The advantages of 3D printing are hundred-fold, the most significant are that you can work with almost any material imaginable and the production of extremely complex shapes that would be impossible to manufacture with tool-based production techniques can be realized.
The complexity in the King Supersport-35's design is evident in the lattice design that is readily visible at the rear of the putter. By removing material from the center of the club head, weight can be redistributed to the head's perimeter to elevate the MOI value of the heel-toe weighted design to more closely approximate that of a mallet.
Cobra also licensed the Descending Loft Technology from Sik putters. The aluminum face insert is divided into four sections; the top section has a loft of 4-degrees, the next section down has 3-degrees of loft, the succeeding section 2-degrees and the bottom 1-degree. The objective of this design is to make sure the launch conditions of the golf ball remain the same regardless of the putting method of the golfer.
At the extremes, golfers with a pronounced forward press will deloft the putter and require more loft at impact and golfers that tend to hit up on the golf ball require less. Descending Loft Technology provides golfers with the correct amount of loft at impact no matter how they putt the ball.
Cobra Connect is the icing on the technological cake. It allows you to accurately track your putting statistics via an app that you download on your smart phone or tablet.
Unfortunately, all this technological goodness isn't going to come cheap. Cobra will be selling the King Supersport-35 for $399, which is clearly in the premium putter category. There aren't going to be many King Supersports made so if this is a putter you must have, you'd best move quickly and snap one up while they're available.
Mike Besa is the Editor-In-Chief of Play It Right - the Philippines' first fully digital magazine on golf. It is the intention of Play It Right to connect Pinoygolfers wherever they are, to foster a spirit of friendship and camaraderie, to inform, entertain and to promote the Spirit of the Game.
