Visiting Gold’s Factory

Tourspecgolfer posted up parts ONE & TWO of the Gold’s Factory Interview as well as the video he took while we visiting Master Sasaya in his workshop. While TSGolfer was busy taking videos, I had a chance to photo document our visit and here it is for your viewing pleasure! We only had the morning at the shop but learned a lot about how much work is put into hand made and crafted clubs and watched the master in action.

Gold’s Factory is located in Itabashi, in Tokyo. We took a 10 minute JR train from Shinjuku to JuJo on the Saikyo Line. (I took Chuo to Shinjuku)		Jujo is a typical smaller scale Japan Rail Station with two main enterances and exits.
The West Exit is the main rotary where cars and buses drive into. Master Sasaya picked us up here.		Itabashi is one of Tokyo’s 23 Wards and is rather densely populated like most of Tokyo. There are some pretty tight spots for driving and walking.

Gold’s Factory is tucked away in the Nakajuku block of Itabashi.		The workshop is a cozy size with all the tools of the trade needed to produce hand made clubs.
Master Sasaya was kind enough to spend the morning with us explaining his machines and techniques.		We talked about golf club designs especially putters, wedges and irons of course!

Make sure you read more to check out more of the great pics from the Gold’s Factory visit!

We wanted to see in person how a raw forged head becomes a beautiful hand crafted wedge. So Master Sasaya showed us.		Watching him grind the wedge was a thing of beauty. He confidently worked the wedge in his hand and we watched it take shape.
By the way the grooves are engraved by hand, another time consuming task.		And yes because of this they are very sharp. Gold’s Factory wedges spin like crazy!

How do the edges get so perfectly smooth and  shiny?		Unlike other manufacturers, Gold’s wedges are hand finished from raw all the way to shine on this grinding belt by hand.
As explained in our Part 2 interview, many levels of grit are used to hand polish the wedge which results in many hours of work.		Master Sasaya creates templates for all his logos and engraving of names and initials. It is not a simple hand stamp.

The CNC engraving machinery takes a lot of expertise and experience to operate. One small mistake and you’ll have to start over from scratch.		Bits and tools of the master. These are also used for cutting out putters for tungsten weights and alumite inserts.
No those are not toothpicks, those are for paintfill!		Finished and ready to be custom shafted and gripped with at the customers specs.

Here’s a look at some of the items Master Sasaya was working on at the time we visited as well as other machines and cool stuff in the shop. We saw milling from the block/billet, engraving, machining as well as a few nice toys like custom Vega Gold’s Factory Blades and several nice putters for customers.