technology
company can’t land within 0.9 grams of that
target with any given club, it’s back to the
drawing board. It’s part of a heavy emphasis
on quality control.
“Each set has a nominal swing weight that
we have to hit, otherwise if you pick up the
golf club, one will feel heavy, one will feel
light,” Louey says. “We’re trying to match up
the swing weight all the way throughout the
set.”
The tips of the shafts are prepared for gluing.
An iron’s lie angle is changed to match the
golfer’s requirements
forgiving Baffler XL irons, you’ll get your order
at blistering speed. Every order that’s received
before midday on a given day, whether it’s for
one club or an entire set, will be processed,
assembled, cut, glued, gripped, packaged and
shipped within 48 hours.
“All the other places I’ve worked, you cut
one shaft at a time,” Louey says. “Here, you lay
the whole set in there, up to eight irons.”
The most impressive part of seeing Cobra’s
clubs made is watching how they’re cut.
Cobra can precisely cut an entire set in one
fell swoop using a modern shaft cutter, which
Louey designed with the help of a Taiwanese
golf machinery manufacturer.
Once the clubs are cut, some need to have
their lie angles adjusted using a ‘bending’
machine. Clubs are locked into a vice, which
displays the number of degrees between
the ground and the club’s shaft and any
manipulations are done by hand to make the
shaft either more or less vertical. Next up,
the clubhead needs to be glued to the shaft,
which is generally the most time-consuming
Clubheads are glued to the shaft, then
allowed to dry
step in making Cobra clubs because it uses
a type of glue that takes 24 hours to set. But
there are ways to circumvent this if an order
needs to be rushed out the door. Through
the use of ‘curing’ cells, the hosel of clubs can
be heated up, so a set of irons can be ready
to be hit within an hour.
Perhaps the greatest illustration of the
specifics of Cobra Puma’s clubmaking is the
need to find the perfect weight for each club.
The clubhead of, for instance, an eight iron,
should weigh around 278 grams and if the
All orders come with different requests in
terms of the type of club, shaft, length, lie
angle and colour. But Cobra pursues even
the most obscure orders, regardless of how
much it may cost the company to find.
“Whatever a customer wants, we will do
our best to source it,” Louey says. “We’re not
limited by using maybe 10 different shafts
and trying to corner everybody into what we
think they should have. If someone’s got a
graphite shaft that Tiger Woods uses and you
want to get that, we’ll source it. We’ll try and
get whatever we can for whoever wants it,
because we want to offer the consumers the
options they are searching for.”
Walking the aisles under the factory’s 25foot high roof, there are rows full of noncustomised golf clubs ready to be shipped
out to the company’s 400-odd accounts
throughout Australia and New Zealand. If it
keeps going the way it is, that list of clients
can only keep growing. •
F
gOL
N A L yE A R
EgIO HE
WA R ITy OF T
L
FACI
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