Today I went up to my grandparent's house in Trumansburg to work on making my golf shaft with help from my grandfather. We started out by choosing a good piece of wood with a straight grain and would be durable and strong. In the end the best piece we found was a 36"x1"x1" rod of cherry wood. We started out by first cutting it down so it would be 30"x5/8"x5/8", and from that we just shaped it to how I wanted it to be.

I can't really make these images larger or else they would overextend into the webpage, so just squint or something.
This was the piece before we did anything:

And this was it after cutting it down to the desired size:

Now the tool next to the block we then used to taper the piece evenly down to about 2 inches before the end. We left the last 2 inches of the tip untouched because we decided it would be better to know the size of the threaded hole in the putter before actually threading the shaft.

After tapering it, I used my grandfathers wood router with a 5/16" rounded bit to round the edges of the shaft. For the final part of the session I sanded down the main part of the shaft to make it more round and smooth. Both end have about 2 inches of uncut area so that if I ever need to clamp it down again, I would be able to, along with allowing for changes in the future to the design of the shaft. The end product of the day is this, and I'm satisfied with the result.

Sorry for the poor quality, my phone was dying and had no flash, I'll get a better quality version up once its charged. As you might be able to see, its still square at either end, and the right side is slimmer than the left, since that would be the tip side. The wooden shaft is also a bit smaller than my current putter's, which is good since I needed a smaller shaft. In the weeks to come I'll be sanding the shaft more to make it more rounded and slimmer, so that I can fit a grip on it since I don't think any current grips are made to fit over a 5/8" shaft. The cherry wood will also darken more, and along with me giving it a good polyurethane finish, it should have a nice dark tone in the end.

My plan now is to finish choosing a final design for my putter head and getting it into CAD Inventor, then Edgecam, which is the program for the CNC Mill of the school.

After being away for the past 4 days at an ice hockey tournament in Troy, NY, I was finally able to come back home and relax, so I've been doing preparations for what I'm going to do tomorrow, February 22. I'll be going out to my grandpa's house in Trumansburg to first of all, learn how to work a lathe, and then carve my shaft out of stock wood he's got in his woodshop. I believe he either has oak, maple, and hickory at his shop, and I hope I'll be able to use the hickory. 

Anyways, a shaft doesn't seem like the hardest thing ever to make, since it's basically just a rod of wood/steel/graphite, hollow in the cases of steel & graphite, and slowly tapers down from top to bottom. Generally the shaft starts about .6in in diameter at the top and between .335in and .37in at the bottom. Shafts for irons, woods, and drivers can be made out of hollow steel or graphite, since they are durable and flexible, along with being very light. However, for a putter it can really be made out of anything, since there is such a low amount of torque on the head. That is why I'll be making it out of wood, hopefully hickory, since it's stronger and more durable than most other wood and was the wood of choice for most clubs made before the implementation of steel. 

For the length of the shaft, it's a bit of a tricky business. On my current putter, the length of it is advertised as 35in; now that is technically correct, since that's the total distance measured from the bottom of the blade to the butt of the shaft. 

However, the actual length of the shaft is about 32in, when I measured it from the top of the head to the butt.  Now this was a very important piece of information for me, since I had thought the actual length of my shaft was 35in, and since it's a little bit long for me, I would cut about a 33in shaft. That's not the case. I took some more measurements with where I gripped the shaft, and found from the top of my hands to the tip it was about 29.5in, which is just a bit too long. Then I took the measurement for when I just let my arms hang down loosely, or the longest possible extension without losing control. That was about 26in. So with those details in mind, I will make my shaft at about 29in, so that in case I want to go back to how I've putted for the last year or so, I'll be able to, but at the same time have the ability to grip down farther, since the grip I have in store for the shaft is about 10in long, and the distance from the bottom of my right hand to the top of my left is about 8.5in. 

I'll be making another post tomorrow afternoon with the results of how my shaft making went.

Head research and design:
For the week of 2/6

So this week I've really dedicated myself to researching putter head design, and how to approach it, and all of that kind of stuff. I started off with the knowledge I got from my interview, which was that putter heads should be around 200g so that it has good balance when swinging it. I then factored in the density of the metal I would be working with, aluminum, and figured the ideal head would be about 4in wide on the face, .5 in back, and .7 in high. The rest of the cutting and edging would be done in the back to promote a head that, when striking the ball, would have a balanced MOI and would not want to swing with the toe or heel overturning each other, so the face stays square throughout the swing.  In order to do this, the toe has to have a bit more material on it than the heel, to balance out the weight of the shaft and the force of the hands. The putter head also should slowly transfer with the length towards the middle of the head, so that for instance .1 in away from the edge of the toe it would have slightly more mass in that area than the area from .1 in - .2 in. Also, right behind where the ball would be stricken, there should be as little mass as possible, to encourage a pure hit and so that the putter doesn't hit the ball with more force than necessary, since you want to have more influence on how hard you want to hit the ball with your hands than the head of the putter. I've started out on preliminary sketches, but am nowhere near done with all of the possible designs. The first page has more simplistic designs, while the second is a bit more advanced, and harder to do calculations for.

  Reflection on Andy's Post on 2/11:
Andy is attempting to run a marathon by the summer, and I really appreciate how hard it is to run, and to run every day for miles. His project comes with a lot of hard work and dedication to his project, and I don't think I could run for 30 minutes every day, since I am not a running kind of guy. I also think he has a really nice, and simplistic way of approaching his goal, and that is to just run, run run, to improve his stamina, which I can't really do with my own project.

I wish Andy the best of luck with his goal and hope that he succeeds in running a whole marathon!

Ay ay ay! I didn't realize my phone took such huge pictures, I really don't think 2 MB was really necessary to capture this.

Anyways, these are just some sketches of possible face groove designs I could implement, if I decide to use grooves at all. Each set of grooves represents a unique solution to how the ball will roll off the face of a putter. Some grooves will help it roll smoother right away by hitting it with less backspin, others will try and correct for mis-hits. These are also the grooves recommended to me by my interviewee, who thought these five would be a good start to making my own set, or using one of these if I think it more advantageous than any other for my style of play.

The outline of the face behind the grooves also doesn't represent the actual shape of the head; it's merely a backdrop to help me visualize the grooves. Now I also want to talk about not having grooves, which I mentioned in my first post, because it's very possible I might not do it due to lack of correct drill bits or simply time. Putters didn't really have grooves until the 1980's, and before then putters still worked just fine, but it did take more skill, finesse, and knowledge of one's putter in order to use the putter to its full capabilities. Whether or not I choose to use grooves is not a decision to make right now, but it is one I'll be thinking about when designing heads, so that some may hit down more into the ball due to the moment of inertia of the putter head so that grooves to make the putter stay on the ground less needed, or a head with a more angled face to give the ball an extra nudge.

Okay! So first things first: my name is Wes Feeney and this is a blog about my senior project in high school for WISE English and will be continually updating it whenever i draw up new sketches, feel like writing out my progress of a few days, or just  posting pictures of what I've made or learned 
           My project is to make a golf putter. Not just assemble one or anything simple like that; I plan on actually milling the head and carving a shaft! Here's a picture of a modern day putter head for those unfamiliar with golf:

       Coincidentally this is actually the stock photo of the putter I use in competition now; notice it has no grooves along the face, which I will talk about in a later post.
      So you may ask now; why, Wes, do you want to make a putter? 
     Well, I've chosen to make one because I have an avid interest in both engineering and golf, and desgining golf clubs is a beautifully simplistic way of combining the two. The reason I'm making a putter and not something like a wedge, iron, or driver (google these if you don't know what they are/look like) is because it's the most simply to make. However, that does not imply at all that it's the easiest to perfect.
    My overall goal is simple: make a putter that I can use in competition and make it before the NYS high school golf championships in June. The little steps, and as my teacher Mr. Creagan put it, broad strokes (haha), along the way are going to be the challenge. 
    The first bit will be researching current putter head designs, groove desgins, and shaft and grip types. Then will be learning how to work a lathe and finish wood. Eventually I'll have CAD drawings of my head, and I'll mill it on the CNC mill in our school's technology department. 
   
    This project is the second of its kind I'm currently facing this year. The first would be in my class Engineering Desgin & Development, in which I'm working on a year long project using the design process. I think it'll be a real challenge of how I manage my time between the two projects, since both technically demand all of my time and energy. In making my putter though, I especially fear that I will screw up the milling of my head, since it'll be made of aluminum and I don't want to go about finding another 4x2 block of it.


  For my first two weeks I'll be brainstorming ideas for the face grooves, head, and shaft of my putter, and simply researching past solutions to the eternal problem of how to make a club hit it straight, no matter how bad the golfer.