How 3D printing revolutionized club design — and what could be next

Unquestionably, the techies and engineers who design the game’s newest equipment are fully fit to do the job — and, with each new club, to deliver dazzle to your own game. But some gearheads like to go in a very different direction, because disruption isn’t merely about breaking things. It’s about being radically better.

The golf equipment industry is loaded with big brains and lofty diplomas. Ballistics PhDs from aerospace. Engine designers from the automotive industry. Materials scientists from advanced manufacturing. They make up a vast army of eggheads, pouring their expertise into a game governed by conformance rules and rooted in tradition.

Innovation happens constantly, though not always as dramatically or regularly as advertisements suggest. Golfers crave the next breakthrough. Manufacturers promise it with every product cycle.

But genuinely disruptive ideas are rare. They don’t arrive on schedule and can’t be conjured by a marketing blitz. On the face of it, they seem to appear out of nowhere, like a hole in one, but they spring from tireless effort, a tolerance for risk and a willingness to question what others accept as settled.

Innovators like Cobra Golf’s director of innovation, Ryan Roach, whose story you can read below, didn’t just contribute to groundbreaking products — they challenged assumptions about how gear should be designed, built and sold.

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RYAN ROACH WAS the kind of kid who could spend Saturday morning at the driving range and Saturday night rolling a 20-sided die. An athlete with nerdy inclinations, he played on his high school golf team but was just as drawn to Dungeons & Dragons as he was to grinding on the practice tee.

“Looking back, the kind of imagination that game required, I think that was probably good training in a way,” Roach says. “You could build whole worlds.”

At 51, Roach retains the boyish enthusiasm of someone always scheming his next experiment. Except now those experiments involve lattice structures and powder-bed fusion, and the designs he’s building are made of metal, printed layer by microscopic layer.

From his office in a boxy building in a Carlsbad business park, Roach has become a driving force in what he believes is golf’s next great manufacturing revolution: 3D printing.

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Inside, the bland exterior gives way to an engineer’s playground. Roach’s desk is crowded with iron prototypes in various stages of completion — some cut in half to reveal their insides, others with grooves not yet machined. His computer screen flickers with CAD renderings of impossible geometries. Walk the hallways with him and he’ll pull open drawers packed with more prototypes: putter heads, wedges, designs that once were and might someday be again.

Roach, who grew up in Sacramento, joined Cobra Golf straight out of UC San Diego and, aside from a brief stint with Spalding, has been with the company ever since. During his 26-year tenure, he’s witnessed watershed moments: titanium drivers that pushed size and forgiveness to new extremes, adjustable weights and hosels that gave players on-the-spot control. To Roach, 3D printing — or additive manufacturing, as people in the industry call it — is every bit as revolutionary.

By the early 2010s, Roach had watched 3D printing transform prototyping and medical devices. He wanted to know what it could do for golf. The potential was clear, but the costs were high: the technology was unproven in performance applications, and the industry was hesitant.

“It was kind of underground but not entirely clandestine,” Roach says. “We kept working on it despite some people saying maybe we shouldn’t be.”

Cobra 3DP Tour Supernova Custom Putter

The COBRA AGERA putter is a multi-material 3D printed construction that brings ultimate stability in a flagship oversized mallet design. Featuring a single bend shaft designed for players with a straighter stroke type. Paired with LA GOLF’s Descending Loft Face Technology that delivers consistent launch and unmatched end-over-end roll performance in the market.
MULTI-MATERIAL CONSTRUCTION
An oversize blade shape combines a 3D printed nylon lattice cartridge-4g, a 304 stainless steel MIM frame–302g and a 3g carbon fiber crown that creates the ultimate design for stability.
3D PRINTED NYLON CARTRIDGE
An intricate 3D printed nylon lattice cartridge optimizes weight savings allowing CG to sit low and forward to optimize energy transfer and stability.
LA GOLF’S DESCENDING LOFT TECHNOLGY
Featuring a 6061-aerospace grade aluminum insert with LA GOLF’s proprietary Descending Loft Technology, utilizes 4 descending lofts (4°,3°,2°,1°) to mitigate delofting and the addition of loft through head delivery during impact and provides an optimal launch for unparalleled end-over-end roll performance.
ADJUSTABLE WEIGHTING SYSTEM
Adjustable weighting system gives the player the ability to interchange to a lighter or heavier weight to achieve a personal feel. All putters ship stock with nominal 15g weights and can move +- 5-10g in either direction. Additional weights sold separately. (5g, 10g, 15g, 20, 25g)

$379.00 from Fairway Jockey

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Enough believers inside Cobra were willing to gamble. In November 2020, the company released its first 3D-printed club, a SuperSport-35 putter. Roach, who’d long specialized in irons, was convinced the technology could go further.

The process isn’t like making a Xerox copy. Additive manufacturing builds objects by adding material — fine metal powder, in this case — layer by layer, guided by digital files. The result is a structure of extraordinary internal complexity. Cobra’s 3D-printed irons are hollowed to reduce mass, then filled with intricate lattice patterns that balance strength and flexibility. Weight gets added back with tungsten inserts, letting engineers control not just how much mass a club has, but exactly where it lives.

Those lattices can be tweaked in CAD and reprinted quickly. Center of gravity shifts. Moment of inertia changes. Iteration accelerates. Cobra can turn around custom irons for Tour players in a month. The method is faster than forging or casting. In some cases, it’s capable of manufacturing feats that wouldn’t be possible any other way.

The proof points have accumulated. Max Homa requested an iron that looked slim at address with a touch of offset; Cobra made it and Homa loved the feel. Gary Woodland put lattice-filled versions in play. In September 2024, Ángel Hidalgo earned the first professional win with 3D-printed metal irons.

For Roach, the excitement extends beyond Tour validation or market presence. There’s the speed of iteration, the creative latitude, the potential for breakthroughs no one has imagined yet. Golfers can get fit now, but truly bespoke equipment — clubs designed and built for an individual — has remained the province of Tour players. That’s what excites him most: the prospect of customization for the masses.

At present, roughly 10 percent of Cobra’s clubs include some 3D-printed component. Roach believes that number could reach 50 or 60 percent. The same mind that once built imaginary worlds now can’t stop tinkering with real ones.

“To me, that’s kind of the main course,” Roach says. “What’s come so far is just the appetizer.”

He’s already thinking about what comes next.