A golf grip seems such a simple item, but making one is anything but elementary.

At Lamkin's Tijuana factory - just south of San Diego - and at Lamkin's China factory, we use a complicated, multi-step process to produce high-quality grips. Major club manufacturers from nearby Carlsbad, Calif. frequently visit to share specifications for upcoming products and are awed by the visual fireworks inside. Here's a behind-the-scenes look at how a synthetic rubber grip is made:

	Blocks of various synthetic rubbers are cut and weighed. These rubbers are developed, sourced and balanced to optimize the final grip you play with for feel, durability and environmental resistance to heat, humidity and ultraviolet radiation. Also included in this weighing process are carbon (Did you know that carbon gives automobile tires and golf grips their black color?), fillers (like the silica that sand is composed of), lubricants (usually petroleum-based oils), and sulfur (the active ingredient that causes everything to bond together later on).
	These materials are then heated, mixed and processed in several large machines that combine all the ingredients and flatten the resulting compound into a continuous rubber sheet which is subsequently cut into a continuous rubber strip. Though grips from two different manufacturers may look alike, their base compounds are most likely very different.
	From here, the strip is brought over to the molding department. The strip is fed into an injection molding machine, and under extreme pressure and temperature, is pushed through a series of runners to fill several grip molds located inside the machine. These steel molds would look like the negative image of a finished grip. All the depressions in the final grip are actually raised features in the molds. Once the sulfur is allowed to work its magic on the ingredients (the actual vulcanization process which cross-links all the molecular chains using temperature, pressure and time), the machine is opened and the molded grip is complete. For cord grips, they're a lot like an Oreo cookie, in that a layer of cord (which is pretty close to the same cotton material you have in your denim jeans) is sandwiched between two thin strips of rubber, molded and then sanded on the surface until the cord shows through.
	The finishing process then begins. The grips are painted (using a very special, rubber-based paint which adds the color and cosmetic appeal to the final grip), sanded, buffed, washed and dried. All these processes are done to make the grip look and feel its best when installed on your clubs.