Golf Putter
Designed in Fusion 360, manufactured across two continents. The head form came from a factory in China. The grooves and the finish came from a shop twenty minutes away.
This case study is still an outline — the facts below are verified, the writing isn't finished.
I wanted a putter. I also wanted to know whether I could carry something from an empty Fusion sketch to a finished object with no team and no budget behind me.
The design
I drew it from scratch in Fusion 360 and revised it several times. Every revision went back to the manufacturers before I committed to it, which costs days on the calendar and saves them everywhere else. The constraints that decide a design are the ones the person cutting the metal tells you about.
Splitting the supply chain
Two vendors, on purpose:
- Head form from a manufacturer in China. Bulk material removal and the basic geometry.
- Grooves and finish from a local shop. Face detailing and final surface work.
Why that split
A factory overseas will take a lot of material off cheaply once the tooling exists, and it will not care whether I order fifty or five thousand. It also stops caring somewhere in the last ten percent, where tolerance and surface quality decide whether a club feels cheap in your hands.
The local shop charges more per hour and answers the phone. When a groove came out wrong I drove over and looked at it.
So I bought form from one and precision from the other.
The part that matters
I ran this same split on a $600K hardware program at Dreamscape. Injection-molded shells, custom PCBs and battery packs came from China; final assembly and electronic components I sourced domestically. Five vendors, two countries, and BOM cost came down 30%.
Nobody asked me to reproduce it here. There was no program, no budget, and no one to justify the decision to. It is where the constraints push you once you have done it before.
The putter is fine. The sourcing decision is why it is on this site.