News

Measuring Up

Details: Category: Industry; Published: Thursday, 01 November 2012 06:11; Hits: 24284

When you maintain equipment at a golf course that bears the name of the PGA of America, is a host site of a PGA Tour event and is home to 90 holes of resort golf in one of the nation’s most posh addresses, there is little wiggle room when it comes to helping provide the best possible playing conditions on a daily basis.

But when it comes to ensuring a consistent height of cut throughout six courses, John Patterson, equipment manager at PGA National Golf Resort and Spa in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., admits to getting a little frustrated.

The flat, aluminum bar on the half-dozen height-of-cut gauges that Patterson and his seven equipment technicians use can flex and bend during mower set-up leading to inconsistent heights of cut from one piece of equipment to the next. That can be a problem when managing 90 ultradwarf Bermudagrass greens.

“We have several gauges in use at any time. We see variations from gauge to gauge from six-thousandths to seven-thousandths of an inch. We mow at a tenth of an inch, and that’s 6 or 7 percent of our mowing height.”

If one gauge is off by 7 percent on the down side of the desired mowing height and another gauge is off by the same amount on the high side, suddenly mowing heights can differ by as much 12-14 percent from green to green. And that is unacceptable at PGA National.

Patterson asked his friend Stephen Tucker, equipment manager at TPC Four Seasons Las Colinas in Irving, Texas and founder of the International Golf Course Equipment Managers Association, if he experienced the same problem. The pair approached Mark Pilger of SIP Corp. of Tampa, Fla., on behalf of IGCEMA and asked whether he could make something stronger that would not bend and would result in more consistent and repeatable settings.

Within a couple of weeks, Pilger produced a prototype that instead of using an aluminum bar as its base utilizes an 18-inch, rectangular tube fashioned from 1/16-inch, stress-relieved steel. At 3.7 pounds, it is nearly twice the weight of the 2-pound aluminum model, and the same weight as other steel bar gauges that Patterson says tend to flex and bend just as much as their aluminum counterparts. The steel tubing, while being heavier, also is stronger and resists bending and flexing, allowing for users to get accurate height-of-cut readings more consistently, Patterson said.

“The bars can bend or twist if someone just pushes or leans into them,” Patterson said. “I weigh 200 pounds, and I can’t bend the tube even if I put all of my weight into it.”

The prototype already is in its third iteration, and is being tested at 20 golf courses throughout the country as well as by scientists at Toro, Jacobsen and John Deere. It will be on display at next year’s Golf Industry Show in San Diego, and Tucker said plans include raffling off the prototypes on display there.

What makes the SIP gauge so unique, said Tucker, is that its strength yields consistent and repeatable readings regardless of who uses it.

“If I set it, or my assistant sets it, we can get the same reading,” Tucker said of the steel-based gauge. “With the aluminum one, depending on who sets it I can get two different readings.”

Traditional gauges used for set up can work fine, but the bar can bend if too much pressure is applied, opening the door for inconsistent settings throughout the fleet. And while Pilger admits that even the savviest golfer can’t detect mowing height differentials of a few thousandths of an inch, inconsistencies here and there begin to add up and eventually make a difference.

“If you begin to add up 10 or 15 thousandths of an inch here and there, you’re definitely going to see that,” Pilger said. “When you’re mowing below an eighth-of-an-inch, every thousandth counts.”

After approaching Pilger, Patterson conducted a live demonstration for him using two gauges to set up two reels at a height of cut of one-half-inch. One was on the desired half-inch reading, while the other, while set to one-half-inch, was reading at .493 inches. Patterson told of a colleague who learned his height of cut readings were off by fifteen-thousandths.

“We’re seeing stuff all over the map,” Patterson said.

Patterson said his goal with helping develop a tool that results in accurate height of cut is to help make life easier for other equipment managers and technicians.

“Consistency and repeatability. It doesn’t matter who is handling the gauge, you’re going to get an accurate reading with it,” he said. “I can have a green horn in the shop set it, and it’s going to be right.

“We want the answer to any question regarding quality of cut to be: ‘It’s your grass, not our machine. We know our stuff is right.’ And here I want to be in a position where anyone from the USGA or the PGA Tour can come in and say: ‘Yes, these readings are right.’ It takes all of those questions out of the shop.”

The gauge eventually will be readily available, but only through the IGCEMA Web site with an anticipated price point of $250 for association members and $275 for non-members, Tucker said.

“We look at it like the USGA and the Stimpmeter,” Tucker said. “We are an association that can produce a tool to help people in this industry do things better. And when we can, we will in vest in those tools. I think it’s a home run for the industry.”