Watching golf videos on YouTube during the boredom of pandemic isolation, Everett Farr found his engineering mind struck by seeing how far a golf ball skids off the face of the putter at impact before rolling.
The revelation prompted Farr and his partners, Matthew Fuchs and Michael Little, to create the Makefield V-S putter that the fledgling company markets as “the last putter you will ever buy.”
“Everett looked at putters on the market and thought, ‘I think I could do this better,’ ” said Little, a former PGA club professional now co-founder and vice president of marketing and sales for Makefield Putters.
Utilizing the kind of adjustability in weighting that manufacturers have developed to customize and fine-tune drivers to suit individual swings, Makefield designed a mallet with three parallel channels filled with adjustable weights to create what it calls a “path of inertia.”
Makefield putters start as a solid piece of aircraft-grade alloy that is then CNC-milled and -assembled using custom-built robotics. The X3 weight system uses aluminum, stainless steel and tungsten to create endless customizable weighting options to accommodate all types of golfers’ needs. The X3 system accounts for different kinds of strokes, skill levels and green speeds to create maximum adjustability and performance.
“We chose aircraft-grade alloy, to have the feel of a softer face, and drove three channels 3 inches long packed with tungsten rods,” Little said. “That’s like an arrow piercing through the air, which is what’s balancing out the path of the putter head.”
Makefield putters are designed to solve the most common problems golfers experience on the greens: wobbly strokes, distance and directional control and skidding after bouncing off the clubface.
To address these issues, the path-of-inertia system utilizes the weight, moment of inertia, and location of the center of gravity to “autocorrect” the stroke to produce a more pure roll unique to its putters. Path of inertia naturally guides the stroke, balancing the clubface to the path while providing a more centered impact to produce an immediate and consistent roll.
The putter’s face pattern is optimized to contact the ball with minimal friction through what it calls Radial Cusp Face Technology (RCFT). Through precise CNC milling of the face, individual intersectional nexuses are created with a near point-like structure. The radial grooves profile evenly distributes the force of the ball that impacts the face into the putter body to keep it from sticking to the ball.
Makefield sells only the one V-S model ($399), with three shaft choices: slant neck, center shaft and double bend. Its selling point is personal customization to optimize the center of gravity, overall weight and swing weight to each golfer’s stroke.
The myriad biases for fine-tuning the center of gravity include standard (optimal tempo for feel of mallet and control of a blade), heel-weighted (for those who miss right), toe-weighted (for those who miss left), face-weighted (for blade-like directional control) and back-weighted (for mallet-like distance control).