Banging out balls

Modern servocontrols help finishing machines produce golf balls faster than ever before. An as-molded ball sitting in the mold lower half shows the small (0.040-in. tall) protrusions about its equator. The protrusions are purposely put there for alignment in ball polishing machines. The CNC Seam Prep Machine from Big Bend Machine & Tool makes extensive use of modern servocontrol technology to finish one golf ball/sec. Balls in the three-row, multilevel track feed to orientation cups where a servomotor-driven pick-and-place mechanism shuttles them to finishing operations located about an indexing turret, also servomotor driven. The system uses a touchscreen for routine machine control and programming. Switching from one ball type to another takes only a few seconds. The IIS DeltaPro Single Axis Positioning Controllers are located in the right side of the cabinet. All golf balls today are made through some kind of molding process. That goes for the cheapest range balls to the most exotic models used on pro tours. But no matter what process was used to make it, a ball after molding has up to 20 small tubular projections sticking out up to 0.04 in. from the ball equator in all directions along with a thin parting line. Obviously, you can't sell golf balls in this condition. The imperfections have to come off. The first buffing machine for this purpose manually loaded and could finish about 30 balls/min. Current pure-mechanical machines produce about 40 balls/min and were, until recently, considered state of the art. Enter Gil Barfield, an engineer with more than 30 years experience designing golf-ball-making equipment at his Big Bend Machine & Tool Co. in Carrabelle, Fla. The company builds thousands of golf-ball molds annually for every major ball manufacturer and recently designed and built a new servomotor-driven ball finisher. Big Bend's CNC Seam Prep Machine is