How Groovy Are The Grooves On Your Wedges?

- Ken Lye

Why is this of concern? Well, aside from your putter, your wedges are your other scoring clubs. They are crucial for up and downs around the green, for that under 100m shot you need to put close to save par when you laid up from the trees or to set you up for that birdie chance after a big drive. How often have you heard your playing partners exclaim that their wedge shots landed near the flag but it rolled so far away or even off the green?

The answer – it’s the grooves. They are worn out. The grooves are all important in wedges to control distance, spin and trajectory.

At impact, a wedge’s grooves bite into the cover of the golf ball. A player’s downward strike on the ball, coupled with the sharp grooves, traps the ball against the ground and creates backspin. The roughness or texture of the face of a wedge also has an effect on spin. Take for example the texture of Vokey’s Spin Milled 6 wedges. These have a new parallel face texture on their proprietary TX4 grooves. This texture increases the “grab” factor at impact, especially on partial shots to create more spin.

Over time and repeated impacts, the grooves will start to wear out and eventually become smooth and dull. The dulled grooves, usually on the lower part of the club face, then causes the ball to roll up the face slightly before catching some of the higher grooves. When this happens, spin is lost because friction is lost.

At Titleist's state-of-the-art Manchester Lane Test Facility in Massachusetts, USA, these SM6 wedges were tested to see the effect of grooves on performance. With the aid of a 100-yard perfectly flat green at the facility and a wedge-hitting robot, they tested wedges that had been played for 125 rounds, 75 rounds versus new wedges with fresh grooves. The average results are as follow :

From the results of the testing, the empirical data shows 3 major performance indicators :