Golf Ball Manufacturing: From Feathers to ABB Robots

Golf ball manufacturing looks simple from the outside, since the product is a small white sphere with a few hundred dimples. Inside the factory it takes rubber mixing, core moulding, cover casting, painting, printing and a check of every ball. This post follows the ball from hand-stitched feathers to modern solid and multi-layer designs, looks at what is reported from Titleist's plants this autumn, and asks where ABB robots fit. ABB has not announced a golf ball customer, so the ABB parts here are possibilities based on what its robots already do in other plants.

A TaylorMade three-piece golf ball with a urethane cover, showing the dimple pattern. Photo: R. Henrik Nilsson / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

How golf balls went from feathers to rubber and resin

The early ball was the featherie, a hand-sewn leather pouch stuffed with boiled chicken or goose feathers and then painted. It was slow to make and expensive, at 2 to 5 shillings each. Around 1848 the Rev. Dr. Robert Adams Paterson introduced the gutta-percha ball, the guttie. It was cheaper and could be reshaped when damaged. Players soon noticed that nicked balls flew better, which led makers to hammer patterns into the surface on purpose.

Featherie golf balls, the hand-sewn leather balls stuffed with feathers. Photo: Geni / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

In 1898 Coburn Haskell of Cleveland, Ohio, wound rubber thread into a ball at the B.F. Goodrich plant, and the wound ball replaced the guttie. Dimples came with it. A patent for an indented ball was granted to David Stanley Froy and colleagues in 1897, and William Taylor patented a dimple design in 1905, which became the dominant pattern. Early shops at St Andrews, including the one run by Tom Morris, still sold balls made by hand, so the change to moulded balls took years. Each step solved one problem and created another, from cost to flight to how consistently a maker could repeat the result.

An early photograph of golfers including Allan Robertson and Tom Morris. Photo: National Galleries of Scotland via Wikimedia Commons (no restrictions)

The next change was solid cores. In 1967 Spalding bought a solid-ball patent from Jim Bartsch and developed a resin that removed the need for wound layers. Most golfers who are not professionals now play solid-core balls, which are simpler to mould and cheaper to produce than a wound ball. Today's rules say a conforming ball must be at least 1.680 inches (42.67 mm) across and weigh no more than 1.620 ounces (45.93 g). With limits that narrow, every ball has to come off the line close to the same size and weight.

The Tom Morris golf shop in St Andrews, Scotland, established 1848. Photo: Son of Groucho / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

What golf ball factories report using today

The recent news is a run of factory tours. GolfWRX published a visit to Titleist's ball plants on 17 October, describing Ball Plant III in New Bedford, Massachusetts, with a rubber mixer taller than three basketball hoops stacked up, X-ray equipment, heavy automation and a robotic cutter for rubber blocks. MyGolfSpy and Yahoo Sports ran similar tours in September and October. Titleist says it has X-rayed every ball since the 1930s, a check that still happens before painting. The reports describe a plant where machines do much of the heavy and repetitive work.

A Top Flite two-piece golf ball with an ionomer cover. Photo: R. Henrik Nilsson / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Robots in this industry are not new. A 2005 Automate article described Acushnet's custom-ball plant in the New Bedford area, where a robot picked freshly painted practice balls off a moving conveyor and stacked them on drying trays. The line made 72 balls per minute, with bursts up to 80. Acushnet reported a 30 percent gain in productivity, labour cut from two operators to one and a payback of two years. Uptime was near 100 percent, according to the engineer in charge. The article does not name the robot's maker, and it is two decades old, so treat it as history and not as a picture of today's lines.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots picking small round chocolate balls from a conveyor. Photo: ABB

ABB's catalogue suggests where its robots could do similar work. The IRB 360 FlexPicker is a fast delta robot that picks small, round items off a conveyor and places them in trays or cartons, the same job as unloading painted balls. PickMaster software lets cameras guide the picks. For a plant that already moves thousands of balls an hour, packaging cells with FlexPicker are the closest existing match, though no source shows ABB doing it in a golf ball plant.

An engineer at a FlexPicker cell set up with PickMaster software. Photo: ABB

Where ball plants could go next

Moulding and inspection are the next candidates. A compact arm such as the IRB 1200 can unload parts from a press and place them on a conveyor, as it does in injection moulding cells. One report on the Titleist tour describes robots inspecting ball surfaces with sub-millimetre accuracy, so vision-guided handling is already part of the picture. Painting balls with a spray robot is another possibility, since ABB's paint robots are built for even coating.

A Slazenger V Series Distance golf ball with a Surlyn cover, made in 2025. Photo: R. Henrik Nilsson / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

The open problems are cost and variety, and for small plants also skills. A plant making several ball models, plus custom logos for tournaments and companies, changes products often, so robot cells need to be reprogrammed quickly. Testing in simulation helps, and programs like this are usually built first in RobotStudio before they reach the floor. Small-volume custom printing is harder to automate than a long run of one model, and a robot cell has to pay back in a plant that already has older conveyors and dedicated equipment.

The new generation ABB IRB 1200, a compact arm for machine tending and small parts. Photo: ABB

A golfer buying a dozen balls gets a product whose size and weight are already tightly controlled, and better automation mostly means fewer rejects and steadier quality. Skills matter too: operators who used to unload trays by hand can move into inspection and cell supervision, as the Acushnet engineer described for the worker who was not displaced. Any new cell also needs safety guarding, a risk assessment and trained people to run it, and those costs belong in the payback calculation along with the robot itself.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots packing small items into boxes at high speed. Photo: ABB

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