Tour of Ping Plant
Proves Educational

By Shannon Gazze
GolfArizona.com Valley Editor

PHOENIX - My grandfather gave me my first real set of golf clubs the summer before I entered high school. Most kids play with hand-me-downs, but most hand-me-downs aren’t Pings. Mine were.

Ping Eyes. I didn’t know much about the clubs at the time. I liked the name and the cool metallic finish, and Gramps made it quite clear that they were expensive and needed to be handled responsibly. I also liked the fact that everyone was jealous of my sticks, if not my game.

After a few years, I traded in the Eyes for Gramps' Ping Eye2s. College rolled around and I graduated to Ping Zing2s. For more than a decade I've played with Ping irons and putters, and I've been a happy camper. Yet I never fully understood or appreciated what I had until last Thursday.

That's the day I toured the Karsten Manufacturing Corporation facility right here in the Valley.

Before I made the short trek to the plant in Northwest Phoenix, I figured I should do a little research. I logged on to Ping's web site at www.pinggolf.com and found it to be an interesting slice of cyberspace as well as a valuable tool. Along with information about their entire product line featuring the brand new i3 irons and Ti3 woods and including golf bags, clubs, accessories and apparel, the site offers a pre-tour which takes you through the various steps that a Ping iron goes through in KMC’s subsidiary plants before it gets to the finishing plant in Phoenix.

The process is fascinating. Clubs are designed on computers, where Ping engineers figure out exactly how a design will perform before it ever leaves the screen. When they are ready to build a club, they make a mold (actually many molds) to create a wax replica of the computer design.

At the Dolphin, Inc. foundry, they attach several replicas to a wax tree with a funnel system on the end and dip the whole thing in ceramic sand - first fine, then course. The ceramic forms a shell around the wax, which is then heated and the wax removed.

Molten steel or copper is then poured through the funnel into the shells, which break apart as the newly cast irons cool. This process is called the "Lost Wax" technique of investment casting, and its use in club making was one of the many pioneering ideas of Ping founder Karsten Solheim. Of course, I left many steps out of the process, including a key heat-treating method carried out at Sonee, Inc., which you can read about in detail on the web site.

Armed with my newfound knowledge, I arrived at Ping's fitting center. That’s where the factory tour originates. There, too, I found lots of interesting information. A timeline of significant events in Ping's history graces the wall of the waiting room.

Karsten Solheim was a mechanical engineer for General Electric in Redwood City, California in 1959. That’s when he patented the Ping 1-A putter. The idea behind the putter was that by removing metal from the interior of the club and making it heavier at the ends, the club would not twist as much when a ball was struck away from the sweet spot. Solheim’s theory of "perimeter weighting" made his clubs an instant success and is still in use in the clubs Ping makes today.

Because this first putter was hollowed out to allow for perimeter weighting, it made a crisp "ping" sound when struck. Hence the club name, the company name, and the birth of a legend.

In 1961, Solheim picked up and moved to Phoenix. A year later his putter was used by Canyon Classic champion John Barnum to win its first PGA Tour event.

More clubs would follow and the casting process would be perfected. In 1970, Solheim was in a car accident and grew his now-familiar goatee to hide a scar on his chin. In 1972, he invented a color coding system that allows Ping to individually fit golfers of every size and swing type.

In 1979, Ping became the most-used putter on the PGA Tour, beginning an incredible 20-year streak that is still going strong today. The Ping Eye2 debuted in 1982, and it has become the best selling set of irons in the game.

The years have been good to Solheim, and he is still kicking around ground-breaking ideas in his head, but the company reins have passed to his son, John Solheim, who is now Ping’s chairman and CEO. KMC still sits on the land where Karsten opened shop in the '60s, only now it has expanded to include 28 building over four square blocks, including Karsten Engineering Corporation, which uses the same skill and know-how that made Ping a success in the golf world to service engineering contracts in the real world.

After poring over the timeline and handling a few of the demo clubs in the waiting room, it was time for the tour. A video hosted by Peter Oosterhuis opens things up and discusses in part the club-making process I just described. It also enumerates the advantages of custom fitting clubs to individual golfers.

It’s this kind of continuing service and reliability that make Ping as popular as it is. Once clubs are purchased, information about the set is kept in the vast Ping computer banks. If a club is lost or stolen, you can get an exact replacement made and sent to you through one of Ping's 1800 fitting centers around the country. If you've outgrown your clubs or begin using someone else's, Ping will adjust your club heads to fit you. They can also adjust the loft.

All of this is made possible by another Karsten invention - a machine that dials up the correct color code and loft for each club. Thanks to the heat treating of the club heads, Ping metal is malleable and the adjustments are quick and easy.

When Oosterhuis wound down his video presentation, Ping's Pat Abshire showed us around the plant. We didn’t see much of the on-site driving range, but Abshire explained that engineers and PGA professionals test clubs there using state-of-the-art technology.

First of all, the ground is coated with microphones, which submit sound input that allows computers to judge each ball's flight path including loft and spin.

They also use a high-speed camera that shoots five million frames per second to see ball compression and spin. It's one of a handful of cameras with that capability in the entire country. An on-site weather station allows the engineers to factor climate changes into a club’s performance. For instance, graphite shafts are made of a compound of several different materials and will flex differently in hot and cold weather, whereas steel shafts keep a more consistent flex.

Abshire points out that all Ping shafts, as well as the grips, are designed by Ping and made by the top manufacturers in their respective markets.

What we did see (and hear) on the tour was the process a rough iron goes through at the finishing plant. Ping prides itself on efficiency, and they indeed run a pretty tight ship in the Phoenix factory. Very few clubs are made until they are ordered, meaning the company keeps little stock inventory on hand. Clubs go from station to station, getting cut, buffed, epoxied, gripped, hammered into shape, hand-painted and cleaned.

At the gripping station, workers can grip 20 sets per hour, and they look like they are having fun doing it. A club is placed on a swivel and double-sided tape is applied to the end of the shaft. Then the worker gives the club a fling and the tape winds around the twirling club.

The cleaning process, wherein club heads are tumbled in giant vats along with a pebble-like media, makes most of the noise at the plant and gives Ping irons and putters their famous shine-free look.

Eight hundred employees work at the Phoenix Ping plant, while KMC employs about 1300 employees world-wide. Along with an assembly plant in England, Ping has opened large distribution centers in Canada and Japan and caters to 84 countries in all. But all Ping equipment is 100 percent made in the USA.

The Ping tour wraps up where it started, in the fitting center. There fitting specialists help you to test your own Pings to see if they are still accurately fitted to your swing, or simply swing the clubs on site to get an evaluation of the size and specifications you should look for when purchasing any clubs.

As suspected, my clubs had become ill-fitted over time as I grew and developed a more upright swing. Specialist Dave Skelton took a look at my swing and recommended the correct color code and grip size for my swing.

• Past course reviews from GolfArizona.com • Past articles by Shannon Gazze

Before I left the plant, I checked in with Advertising Manager Pete Samuels. Just getting to Pete was no small task, since security tends to be pretty tight around the plant. "We're in a very competitive business," Samuels explains. "We are basically selling technology, so we’ve got to be protective of the technology we have. I’ve never witnessed any real security problems here, though. Maybe because it is so tight."

I asked Samuels first whether the computers were ready for Y2K, seeing as how they store information about every club Ping has ever made.

"The computer department has been all over that for many years," he said. "I think we’ll be okay."

I also wanted to know what it takes to become a Ping engineer.

"There's no degree in club design," Samuels said. "We usually try to find young engineers that have been successful in other fields and groom them to our way of doing things. Of course, you’ve got to be a free-thinker to be in this industry, so we let them bring a little into it too."

And, naturally, I was curious about the origins of the cool little Gumby-esque golfer that is part of the Ping logo.

"Mr. Ping was something John Solheim molded out of clay in the late '60s," Samuels answered.

Samuels' department has been kept quite busy with the introduction of Ping’s new line of clubs. Ping only releases new designs every four to five years now, so you can imagine the clamor that accompanies one so popular as the new i3 design. The i3 comes in two forms for the men (and two more for the women), the Blade and the O-Size.

The i3 hosel is notched to allow for easier custom fitting of the club face. The Blades are offset very slightly and have a smaller face. It’s tough to find quality blade clubs these days and professionals and low handicaps are already ordering these by the truckload.

The O-Size clubs have a higher offset and are wider, making them more forgiving. Segmenting the market as they have with the i3s is new to Ping’s philosophy, but Abshire says the demand was so high for a good professional-quality club that they had to do it.

With the tour complete and me out of questions, I packed up my Zing2s and headed home, content and simply itching to go out and try my "new" clubs.

If you are interested in taking the tour, you should call Ping at (602) 687-5385. Tours convene every Tuesday and Thursday morning, but they fill up fast. More than 500 people a year explore their golf clubs' roots via a factory tour. You will want to call at least a couple weeks in advance. If you can’t fit in a tour, visit the web site and get a club fitting anyway. The fitting is free, and is available during regular business hours.

The Ping factory is located at:
2201 W. Desert Cove
Phoenix, Arizona, 85029