Alright, so today I’m gonna walk you through this little experiment I did with nitro golf ball compression. Don’t expect anything fancy, it’s just me messing around and seeing what happens.
First off, I grabbed a bunch of nitro golf balls. You know, the cheap ones you don’t feel bad about losing in the woods. I’m not about to start tearing apart Pro V1s, haha.
Then, I started looking into how to actually measure the compression. I didn’t have some fancy machine, so I had to MacGyver something. What I ended up doing was using a vise. I placed the golf ball between the jaws of the vise and slowly tightened it.
I know, super scientific, right?
Anyway, I marked the vise handle so I could get a rough idea of how much I was compressing the ball each time. Not perfect, but better than nothing. Each “mark” was roughly equivalent to a set amount of pressure increase. Just eyeballing it, really. I know, I know, precision is key, but hey, this is for fun.
Next, the fun part. I started cranking the vise. I went in increments, tightening the vise a little at a time and observing what happened to the golf ball. I was looking for any visible deformation, cracks, or anything else interesting.
I recorded everything, too. I took pictures and videos with my phone at each stage of compression. Honestly, the videos are shaky and the lighting sucks, but they’re good enough for me to remember what I saw.
Here’s what I found:
- At first, the ball just flattened a little. Nothing dramatic.
- As I tightened the vise more, the ball started to bulge out around the sides. It was pretty cool to see.
- Then, eventually, crack! The outer shell gave way. It wasn’t a clean break, more like a spiderweb of cracks appearing.
- Keep cranking and the insides of the golf ball just…squished out. It was kind of a mess.
Cleanup wasn’t fun, I can tell you that much.
What did I learn?
Honestly? Not a whole lot that’s actually useful. But it was interesting to see how much force it took to actually destroy one of these cheap golf balls. It also gave me a better appreciation for the engineering that goes into making golf balls that can withstand being hit at 100+ mph.
Would I do it again? Maybe. I’m thinking next time I might try it with different types of golf balls to see if there’s a noticeable difference in how they compress and break. Like I said before, don’t expect anything accurate, it’s just me having fun.
So yeah, that’s my nitro golf ball compression experiment. Nothing groundbreaking, but a fun little way to spend an afternoon.
