Need your help Ags… I work at a very large, premier resort course in Texas…

At our course, we offer our golfers their choice of TP5, ChromeTour, and ProV1 at our Practice Range… We are under contract to offer all three… Have to be white…

The balls have to be sorted by hand… We spend about $45k in man hours annually manually-sorting balls…

I'm looking to see if there are any Good Ags who can help me put together an automated ball sorter…

I talked to a firm that has developed one, but they want $250k for it…

Gotta believe with inexpensive optical scanning, this is isn't rocket science…

Let me know… The budget is there, and the commitment is there…

Thanks and Gig 'Em !!!

rmkingqx@yahoo.com
Class of 1977

Woah which resort!!??

We hand sorted prov1s and callaway balls at vaquero every night when I worked there in high-school. Caddies helped us which sped things up.

Give the guys some beers and ask the caddies to help out...should cut costs drastically

Would probably be a pretty slow process, im sure you could train a model with machine learning, but the physical separation of the 3 types would pose a challenge. An archimedes screw could funnel balls to the top of a chute, and camera at the top could control some levers that could do the separation

Assuming this is Fields Ranch, what I can't figure out is why they do it this way?

A Titleist bag is mixed with ProV1 of various years/versions … a Taylormade bag is mixed with TP5 and TP5X, but those are totally different golf balls.

I'm assuming that it's just a contractual/sponsorship commitment for advertising/financial purposes and not for actual golf performance purposes.

this sounds like a first world problem that doesn't need to exist.

those are all premier ball selections.

simple - pick one, offer one - it's for warmups.

Wish I could offer up helpful ideas to you OP. Not my area of expertise, but hopefully someone has an option that falls in line of what you're looking for. I would think with this day in age of everything tech that there would be an option at a lower cost, but tbh I wouldn't have known there was the 250k option before your post. Nor would I have known that there are courses that have multiple types of range balls that aren't just phasing out 1 model for the next.

Talk about rich people problems....I suggest hire some high school/college kids and let them do the sorting by hand. Or just pick one brand.

guess I'm just out of the loop of what it costs to pay high school kids these days. $45k seems excessive? maybe not.

regardless, if you want to offer 3 different balls on a driving range the expense to sort them or to pony up for the machine shouldn't matter.

Not what you asked for but maybe divide the range into 3 sections - one for each ball manufacturer.

It'll reduce the amount of time to manually sort since most of the balls should be the same if you collect and dump one section at a time.

Unemployed said:

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Not what you asked for but maybe divide the range into 3 sections - one for each ball manufacturer.

It'll reduce the amount of time to manually sort since most of the balls should be the same if you collect and dump one section at a time.

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Yeah right

You can choose to hit prov1s but only at the yellow flag

powerbelly said:

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If there is budget and desire, it seems the $250k machine is the answer…

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Pays for itself in less than 6 years. Makes you money after if they still insist on offering multiple balls.

Dumb question how much is it to just use (buy) new balls and sell the old for a discount online / pro shop in a barrel unsorted instead of sorting them?

Something tells me close to the same and you don't have to sort balls.

They sort balls every night

As the balls get washed they fall into a big trashcan. Those golf balls are then sorted into separate trashcans/buckets

I'm saying between not spending $45k sorting and probably making $20K in selling old balls, how much is just opening new packs every day and moving on? Seems like $50K or more is a healthy budget given the buying power and discounts.

This got me searching around on the web. Seems like there are quite a few small engineering firms out there that have created some sort of solution. There has to be a young firm hungry to take on something simple like this for well under $250k.

This is a combination of a gravity fed dispenser, some optical sensors, minor coding and maybe some pneumatic blowers of some sort. IF titleist, blower 3 goes off as the ball goes by, etc.

The wine industry has optical sorters that blows any grapes that don't meet specifications off the conveyor belt as they come down the line. Pretty crazy to watch. Maybe reach out to one of them?

Let's say there are 5k balls hit a day. This seems like a low estimate for pga frisco. Your proposal is to just use new prov1s and then just sell them after they are hit once? At $1 per ball (which is also seems low) that would be over $1.8 million per year. And I think the estimate of balls hit and the estimate of net cost per ball are both low in the above calculation.

I don't know the numbers. Nor do we know the facility.

It's why I asked.

JCA1 said:

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The wine industry has optical sorters that blows any grapes that don't meet specifications off the conveyor belt as they come down the line. Pretty crazy to watch. Maybe reach out to one of them?

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I would bet those systems are more than $250k

A little back of the envelope math can give you a ballpark estimate. Assuming 10 minute tee times, that's 6 groups an hour. Assuming each group is a foursome and 8 hours of tee times, that's 192 golfers. Now assume each hits 30 balls warming up, that's 5,760 balls a day. That's probably overestimating if it's a very exclusive club, but it's a decent number to start with.

Frisco (I assume this is where we are taking about bc they have all those balls in the range) has 2 courses. It also has a practice facility. Thats why I assume 5k is a low estimate.

mavsfan4ever said:

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Frisco (I assume this is where we are taking about bc they have all those balls in the range) has 2 courses. It also has a practice facility. Thats why I assume 5k is a low estimate.

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If we're talking 36 holes, then that definitely changes the equation.

But even at 18, I think it's safe to say they'll go through, at a minimum, 5,000 balls on a busy day.

Quote:

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At our course, we offer our golfers their choice of TP5, ChromeTour, and ProV1 at our Practice Range… We are under contract to offer all three… Have to be white…

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That's a shame. ProV1s are available in yellow. ChromeTours are available with Triple Track. Leave the TP5s white. That would make manual sorting much faster. Automatic optical sorting would be a cinch.

Sorry I'm just getting back…

Here's the numbers…

Over 8k balls per day…

To make it easy…

Sorter would only have to sort one type of ball at a time…

Multiple passes with different ball logic in each passes…to get all balls sorted…

The "blower" mechanism is WAY too expensive…

This device would have to be a simple Paddle style with two channels and multiple passes.

Thanks to those of you with thoughts… Thanks to the guys trying to re-invent how they do things…

They don't pay for the balls… Mfg provided…

They ain't spending $250k…

FYI…
Not many people these days invest THEIR money on tertiary equip for a 6-7 year payback (especially when they're not having to do the tedious work themselves)…

Lots of people will invest YOUR money and tell you a 6 year payback is good…

No answer from me, but an interesting problem. It might be worth trying to connect with the dudes that started LostGolfBalls.net to see if they have a solution you can buy/license.



https://www.pggolf.com/