Patent Application
20080207350
A. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to golf clubs. More particularly, the present invention relates to a highly effective golf club for chipping shots.
B. Description of the Prior Art
A golfer's aim in the tee-box would be to get the ball as close to the green as possible or in the fairway from which the golfer continues to hit the ball towards the green and putt onto the hole. Meanwhile, to make the golf course more challenging it contains areas hard to avoid like the hazards, the rough, and the fringe, which is thick with long grasses. Rough grass area borders the sides of the fairways, the desirable areas to hit the ball from. The hazards are the obstacles dotted around the golf course such as ponds, lakes, creeks, rivers and even an ocean. They also include bunkers or sand traps. The fringe or the collar encircles the green with higher grasses or a line of bushes or trees.
For normal golfers, it is a difficult challenge to escape the hazards and go to the hole which is the great achievement in golf. To solve the hazard problem, golfers choose the special golf clubs named wedges made for a greater accuracy in chipping out of the sand trap or the fairway bunker for example. For chipping, six-iron is also recommended for longer distance to the green. Depending on the degrees of bounce and loft, the two important angular elements in a specific wedge club head design, there are lob wedge, sand wedge and gap wedge for the golfer to choose individually or in a set. In the rough of sand, it has been instructed to make a blast shot by slightly digging some sand from under the ball to pick the ball directly off to the surface.
The respective wedges provide more varied shots than irons with different combinations of the loft angle, bounce and sole width. Generally, a lob wedge has the loft of about 60° with 10°-12° bounce and is called a 60-degree wedge, a sand wedge has the loft about 56° and the bounce of about 12°-14° of ascending sole angle to facilitate an escape from the sand with the sole extending relatively wide.
Standard wedge designs can be found in U.S. Pat. No. 3,079,157 to Turner and U.S. Pat. No. 5,326,105 to Fenton, Jr. These and other known golf clubs and especially, iron type clubs produce a higher ball trajectory with a club head primarily comprising a clubface for hitting the ball with certain loft and a sole, which faces away from the clubface and towards the ground with a camber and an ascending angle of bounce to facilitate dealing with hitting the sand, grass or other golf course elements.
However, the conventional wedges are designed to make blast shots creating rough resistances from sand or vegetations against the club swing. These wedges require complex design considerations to compensate such counteracting tendency and send the ball to an intended height and target area. Thus, sophisticated bounce design were necessary at the sole area of the wedge clubs. In practice, the continual efforts to date with whatever combinations of bounce and loft based on the similar pebble-shaped irons alone has not been satisfactory in actually drawing a ball from the hard to reach physical placement in a rough for the majority of non-professional golfers.
Depending on the position the golf ball is in the bunker, there are lies of varied difficulties between a better lie where the ball sits on a relatively flat surface and a lie called egg fry with a large part of the ball buried deep in the sand.
After the tee shot or a fairway drive the ball often lands outside of the green with a distance such as short 30 yards to the hole. Then, the golfer comes to make a chip or pitch shot. Conventionally, pitch shots are made with less lofted irons like the 5 or 7 iron. Flop shot is a type of chip shot having a very high trajectory before sand or water hazard for instance. Confusions arise around the best strategy with conventional wedges.
It is often instructed to open the clubface and get the club under the ball to pop it up. On the other hand, novice golfers receive a different advice not to open the clubface because the club may not dig in the sand or vegetation sufficiently. As individual golfers are so different, there are as varied skill sets claimed to tackle a rough shot. Or some teaches that only lengthy experiences in the courses improve chip shot skills.
Thus, it is an objective of the present invention to provide an advanced structure of wedge, which swings like a normal iron for chipping a ball and requires no sophisticated club controls for the golfer to master to send the ball constantly to a set trajectory depending on the specified loft and bounce.
It is another objective of the present invention to provide a convenient golf wedge to make and use to overcome a rough situation confidently.
The primary use of the conventional wedges at a rough area near the green is to chip shot the ball to get onto the green at best. Around the green an irregular vegetation growth is common and sometimes it is overgrown, too soft, soggy, and in a fat bed formation. It may be very short distance to chip the ball but overly hard to cover for casual players, especially a high-handicap golfer.
In case the ball is buried deep in the overgrown grass rather than held on top of it, golfers have found it more difficult to give the desired backspin to such a ball without an extra positional control of the club by opening or closing the clubface which has become redundant according to the present invention.
The long front edge of the present wedge is always ready to engage more difficult balls at odd lies without additional alignment skill required when using the existing wedge clubs. With the novel wedge the golfer may use his normal swing of the iron clubs towards the aimed trajectory and needs not be distracted in making an uncertain face angle at the impact of the chip shot. In other words, through the provision of the extra reaching edge the club eliminates the difficult manipulations of a wedge and may offer a substantially improved consistency in chipping and thus more predictable ball flight.
The golf club according to the present invention is adapted for chip shots comprising: an upright shaft having a top grip and a bottom end; and a club head having (a) a hosel portion for attaching the bottom end of the shaft, (b) a trapezoidal clubface slanted forwardly with a predetermined angle of loft, a longer leading edge and a relatively short trailing edge, (c) a sole plate having a similar profile to the clubface except where the hosel portion integrates therewith and joining at its front edge with the leading edge of the clubface, the sole plate defining a bounce angle with respect to a horizontal plane normal to the axis of the shaft, and (d) two opposite side walls in the shape of isosceles triangles for connecting the respective sets of opposing side edges of the clubface and sole plate with the apexes of the triangular side walls pointing away from each other, whereby the club head has a V shaped side profile with balanced top and bottom sections centered about a middle plane extending between the clubface and the sole plate as well as left and right sections divided by a centerline running between the opposite side walls of the club head.
The club head of the golf club generally has a V-profile laterally and the sole plate is convex, concave or both in part while the clubface is plain or provided with a set of horizontal grooves for putting spin on the ball.
The leading edge of the clubface defines acute angled points diverging forwardly of the club head to neutralize rough elements of sand, weed and other barriers and reach out to hit a nestled ball back to the fairway.
The characteristic V-shaped lateral edges of the present golf club provide a versatile rough-fighting wedge that may provide a greater sole width than prior art wedges', the higher bounce angle of the lob wedges' for an easy gliding of the club out of the rough and a higher degree of loft angle combined with the extended leading edge defining a pointed clubface to reach a deeply lodged ball, which previously troubled the golfers just to make a contact.
Embodiments of the invention will now be described by way of example with reference to the accompanying drawings.
With reference to
The club head 12 is in a hollow structure having the upper clubface 16 above a similarly shaped sole plate 28 extending from the common leading edge 26 of the clubface 16 rearward at a predetermined angle, which can be chosen to provide a range of sets of bounce and loft correlated to each other as will be described below. For the purpose of dimensional understanding of the club head 12 of the present invention, the leading edge 26 may extends 5.5 inches long with the club face 16 extending 2.5 inches between the leading 26 and trailing 24 edges along the longitudinal centerline C and 2 inches for the trailing edge 24. Each of the opposite side edges 30 of the clubface 16 and the other opposite side edges 32 of the sole plate 28 may be 3 inches long.
In its simpler embodiment shown in
The sole plate 28 may be modified to have shorter trailing edge 24 relative to the opposing trailing edge of the clubface 16 reducing the area of the sole plate 28 to hit the ground at play. In this case, the side surfaces 18 will extend obliquely to the axis of the shaft 14 to chamfer acute peripheral edges against the ground.
While retaining the overall V-profile of the club head 12, the flat sole plate 28 may be modified to be convex, concave or both in part as is well known in the art. On the other hand, the clubface 16 may be plain and/or provided with a set of horizontal grooves that helps in putting spin on the ball. The spin will make the ball fly higher and roll less when it lands.
The golf club head 12 may be made into a single metal structure through casting, investment casting, forging, milling, molding, etc or by a sheet metal technique involving welding processes and then finishing grinds.
Referring to
Unlike most other wedges in irregular shapes that have one clubface and a far different camber profile invisible to the player's eyes leaving a room for guessing the exact point of impact with the floor on which the ball is situated, the club head 10 is advantageously symmetrical in two primary orientations to assist even a casual player in recognizing the spatial positions of the various points of the club head during swing of the club. Substantially, the trapezoidal clubface 16 has identical surface sections about its longitudinal centerline C while the clubface 16 itself is symmetrical to the sole plate 28 about the middle line M. Therefore, the club head 12 of the inventive wedge 10 provides a straightforward visual aid for the user to correctly move the club to an effective hit point between the ball and the rough element.
Referring to
As shown in the illustration of
The V-chip wedge 10 can also make points at a ball buried deep in the sand of a bunker assuming an egg fry formation as in
With the novel V-chip wedge of the present invention the player may not be constrained to just get the ball back to the fairway but can advance it directly to the green. The present wedge will send the ball one hundred yards to the green. Therefore, the V-chip wedge club of the present invention can make an effective instrument for such golfers to break through the course troubles. The high loft coupled with the wide sole and long edged face ensures the ball lifted up in the air to an expected height and distance. In addition, the overall shape of the inventive club head is a trapezoid to provide a visually assuring profile to help make one's chipping swing with confidence directly aiming the green.
In a second embodiment of the present invention, as shown in
Also, the hosel connection can be made from the top surface of the club head to the bottom of the club head, at a bottom club head surface. The hosel connection is preferably made between the trapezoidal club face 16 and the bottom plate 28.
Therefore, while the presently preferred form of the V chip golf club has been shown and described, and several modifications thereof discussed, persons skilled in this art will readily appreciate that various additional changes and modifications may be made without departing from the spirit of the invention, as defined and differentiated by the following claims.
