A golf putter is a club used in the golf sport to make relatively short and low-speed strokes with the intention of rolling the ball into the hole from a short distance away. Golf putter head is the critical component of the putter. Due to the complex shapes of golf putter, stainless steel investment casting is the suitable and ideal manufacturing method to produce the head blanks.
Golf Putter Head Manufacturing Process
In general, there are three main steps in the manufacturing of golf putter head: stainless steel investment casting, machining and surface finish. Among them, stainless steel investment casting is the most difficult and most important step to produce golf putter head. As a professional stainles steel investment casting supplier in China, CFS Foundry has rich experience is supplying high quality golf putter heads with competitive prices for companies all over the world.
Stainless Steel Investment Casting
Stainless steel investment casting, also called stainless steel lost wax casting, is the metal forming process to make golf putter head blanks. Investment cast putter head manufacturing begins with mold making and wax patterns making.
Putter head is made from stainless steel. The mold for casting stainless steel putter head consists of two halves with a hollow cavity that is the exact shape and size of the desired golf putter head. Molten wax is poured into the die cavity and allowed to harden. When the wax is hard, the wax pattern is formed and removed from the mould. This process is repeated several times for obtaining ordered quantity. Several wax patterns are attached to a sprue, looks like a tree. Then the tree aseembly is dipped into a liquid mixture of powdered ceramic material, various chemicals, and a gelling agent. It is set aside until the coating dries. The tree is then placed in a container, and the container is filled with a liquid molding slurry, which is allowed to harden.
The hardened shell is heated to about 1,000-2,000° F (550-1,100° C) in an oven to melt the wax patterns. The melted wax runs out the bottom and any wax residue is vaporized. Before pouring, stainless steel ingot is melton to liquid status under high temperature, which is prepaid for pouring in the shell. Next, molten stainless steel is poured into the sheel and allowed to harden under room temperature. When the stainless steel has cooled, the shell material is broken away from the tree, and the individual cast golf putter heads are cut off the sprue. The stainless steel investment casting process produces golf putter heads with an excellent surface finish and no flash or parting lines to remove. Pls note, there are two kinds of investment casting methods in China, the special investment casting method in China to produce stainless steel products is called silica sol casting process, which is the most precise investment casting method. And it is district from another investment casting process: water glass casting.
Compared with other products, there exsits difficulty to produce stainless steel golf putter head by investment casting. The challenge is that, we can see the neck area is very thin and long, so the wax patterns are easy to get deformed after hardening. Therefore, after casting, stainless steel investment casting manufacturer needs to add a straightening process on the golf putter head blanks by straightening mold.
CNC Machining
After casting, as the red face (the front face with the grooves on) is concave and not flat enough, so the flat face has to be milled and the grooves need to be CNC machined. This will make the surface flat enough, additional cost will be charged to mill the faces.
Surface Treatment
Even if the surface finish after stainless steel investment casting is the best compared with that of other casting methods. The overall finish of the golf putter head after shot blasting is still not good enough, there are a lot of dents and the surface looks uneven. So, golf putter head buyers can consider brushed finish or mirror polished finish to improve the surface finish. From the image, we can see that both brushed finish and mirror polished finish look much better than shot blasted finish. Especially the mirror polished finish, the gold putter head surface looks like a mirror and is quite shining, but this type of surface treatment requires multi steps of polishing by hand, so it cost more than brushed finish.
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