Last week, we went HEAVY. This week, let’s go light. Why Carbon Fiber? Carbon is very strong and very light, but also very flexible – when compared to a steel or other metal.

Carbon is a great material to use when you are trying to make something LIGHT, but STRONG. Think of the crown on a driver. Imaging removing a lot of weight from the TOP of the head. That will give the club design team discretionary weight that they can reposition wherever they want inside the body. It will also add a little flex and give in the upper part of the head. Carbon has a bit of a deadening action in its material, so it will often produce a dead/ thud kind of sound. This is great in trying to eliminate the “pingy” sounds that often come with metal woods. And, it looks cool!!

The drawback… You have to take the good with the bad, right? That flex, if not dealt with correctly, will cause an energy loss on the top of the clubhead. Meaning – if the ball is hit by a club with a carbon crown at 100 MPH, for example, the carbon will give with the strike – this is energy that is lost back to the clubhead instead of going forward into the golf ball. In plain English, this will reduce the resulting ball speed if left unaddressed.

Insert Jailbreak. If you remember, this had 2 titanium rods, or some metal configuration that connected the sole to the crown in a metal wood. The job of this technology? To stiffen the body to that the head could maximize the ball speed with minimal loss. In recent generations, we have created new ways to stiffen the body without using Jailbreak, but the downside to using carbon fiber still remains – as a manufacturer, if you want to use Carbon fiber in a metal wood, you have to do something.

Carbon Fiber is also very thin. While it is very strong along the pattern lines, it tends to be very weak perpendicular to that axis. In English – if a piece of Carbon fiber is placed flat (horizontally) it is very strong and resilient in the horizontal direction, but very weak in the vertical direction. Code for don’t bang it with an iron head, you can put a hole in the crown. Just use a headcover – always. Educate your members. Now you know.

New applications for Carbon fiber are also coming to bear. We now use a forged carbon fiber – yes, its stamped into shape the same way a metal is forged. Carbon gets stronger in this application, so it has a bevy of interesting uses. Lighter weight and stronger? Interesting!!! Both the Paradym and Smoke drivers utilize forged Carbon fiber in their designs.

The design flexibility more than outweighs these faults. Carbon, like Tungsten, will be around for sometime.