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Golf Ball Dimples - How They Benefit Your Golf Game

by Tom Wilson

Have you ever wondered why there are dimples all over the golf ball and what purpose they serve or how many dimples the golf ball contains. ?

This article will explain the purpose of golf ball dimples. How the golfball dimples control the flight of the ball and why they help you to lower the score in your golf game.

Golf balls, the old feathery, gutta perchas, and even contemporary rubber and surlyn all behave similar. Golf balls were originally a smooth surface shpere. The sphere was smooth and made of different material throug the history of golf.
While playing golf some golfers noticed the older golf balls with cuts and nicks and bruises travelled further than those golf balls with smooth surfaces.

The nicks and cuts on the golf ball caused the ball to travel further when hit with a golf club, further down the fairway compared to a brand new smooth golf ball. ( Did you ever notice at the golf driving range that the old smooth golf balls in the bucket never seemed to go as far as the ones wioth the dimples - ultimately, you try to compensate by swinging harder...

Over time the prudent golfers decide to keep the old balls and treat them with care as if they were a critical part of the golf game. Imagine that some golfers actually saved their old beat up balls for competitive tournaments. The more beat up the ball the more valuable and the more distance the ball travelled. A physicist one day while playing golf discovered the relationship between a golf ball with pock marks and the golf ball carry distance. ( Distance travelled in the air ) The cuts in the surface of the golf ball create turbulence as the golf ball spins backwards after being struck. This turbulance creates a difference in air pressure between the top and bottom of the golf ball. This difference in air pressure creates a force we call lift, which causes the ball to move from low to high pressure. The longer the ball stays in the air the farthur it will travel down the fairway.

The dimples found on a golf ball produce the same force lift as the nicks on the smooth golf ball surface. Experimentation with different dimple patterns and dimple counts lead to the optimized golf ball we play the game with today.