By now, all golfers should be accustomed to seeing drivers that feature adjustable weights in their clubheads. These weights have always taken the form of screws, which can be interchanged amongst two or more "weight ports" on the rear or sole of a driver head.
Vulcan Golf's latest driver takes a new approach. The Powerball V14 driver does utilize weighted screws. But it also utilizes something else: ball bearings.
The Vulcan Powerball V14 clubhead has two channels for housing the ball bearings. The channels start on the toe side and heel side, respectively, of the driver clubhead and wrap around to the rear.
What's the point of this unusual development? To give the golfer the ability to adjust the total weight of the clubhead, and how that weight is positioned around the clubhead, thereby affecting both trajectory and ball flight biases.
In the Vulcan Powerball V14 driver, the combination of the channels and ball bearings, plus two weight ports for screws, results in a driver head that can be made as light at 183 grams or as heavy as 220g. And that weight can be positioned more toward the heel or more toward the toe; the ball bearings can even be positioned such that more weight is closer to the clubface or to the rear.
Here's how the Powerball V14's bearing housings (channels) work:
The driver comes with two types of ball bearings: stainless steel ones that weight 2 grams each, and "Nylon Spacer Pearls" that weight two-tenths of a gram each. There are 14 of each kind. These 28 bearings can be used in any combination.
Say you want 4 grams of weight on the toe side, and 4 grams on the heel side. You insert two of the 2-gram steel bearings in each of the two channels on the driver head; then you fill in each channel with the very low weight "pearls" to secure the ball bearings into the channel. The "pearls" are essentially spacers; seven ball bearings are used in each of the two channels. The golfer decides how many of those will be weighted, and how many will be spacers.
The clubhead itself is a 430cc model utilizing a seamless Vacuum Cast Titanium 2-piece, "pull-face" construction. The face is forged SP700 Beta Titanium.
Gary Hansberger, founder and president of Vulcan Golf, says that the Powerball V14 clubhead is "the most expensive driver head on the planet to manufacture. Probably costs twice what the big brands pay for their highest end heads." The cost of that construction results in the Powerball V14 driver carrying the highest price tag of any club in the Vulcan Golf lineup, $499.
The UST V2 57g .335 tip graphite shaft is standard, but many custom options are available. The Winn G8 grip is the stock grip, but custom options also exist there. The driver is being introduced with lofts of 9.5 and 10.5, with more versions expected later. Limited quantities of both lofts are available now, but the official launch of this product will come early in 2006.
The Vulcan Golf website is located at www.vulcangolf.com.
