Industry Watch · Metal Additive · Golf

The First 3D-Printed Driver Is Here — and the Real Story Is a Missing Weld Line

A direct-to-consumer brand from small-town Illinois just beat every golf giant to a milestone: a titanium driver printed as one piece, body and face together, with no weld anywhere on it. Here's why that seam mattered, what testing showed, and why this news hits different in San Diego — the county where most of the world's drivers are designed.

Dreaming3D · Carmel Valley, San Diego · July 2026 · ~9 min read

For six years, metal 3D printing crept through the golf bag from the green backward. Putters first. Then irons. The driver — the one club that takes a 100-plus-mph collision hundreds of times per set of range balls — stayed stubbornly conventional.

That changed this year. MyGolfSpy just published hands-on testing of the Sub 70 TAIII 3D — which, to the reviewer's knowledge, is the first 3D-printed driver anyone can actually buy. Not a tour prototype, not a trade-show concept. A $549 club with a checkout button. And according to the same report, at least one major equipment maker is expected to follow with printed metalwoods within a year.

We're a 3D printing shop, not a golf blog, so we're going to do what we do with rocket engines and "consumer" metal printers: pull the manufacturing story out of the marketing and explain why this one genuinely matters.

Why the driver came last

If you've followed 3D printing in golf, you know the sequence — and the order isn't random. It tracks difficulty almost perfectly:

1. 2020 — PUTTERSCOBRA's KING Supersport-35 becomes the first 3D-printed putter sold at retail, built with HP's Metal Jet binder-jetting process. Smart starting point: a putter head is compact, mostly solid, and never sees a violent impact. Public reporting says COBRA had already quietly printed dozens of one-off clubs for tour players before this.
2. 2024–2026 — IRONSCOBRA's LIMIT3D irons (316L stainless steel, laser-sintered, internal lattice) arrive as a $3,000 limited run of 500 sets and reportedly sell out fast, followed by the standard-lineup 3DP TOUR, MB and X models. Harder problem: full-swing impact loads, but still a small, dense head with thick sections.
3. 2026 — THE DRIVERSub 70's TAIII 3D ships. Hardest problem of all: a large, hollow, thin-walled titanium balloon that has to survive thousands of high-speed collisions while staying under strict weight targets — printed as one piece.

A driver is essentially aerospace-grade thin-wall work. Wall sections run fractions of a millimeter in places, the whole hollow head weighs around 200 grams, and the face has to flex like a trampoline without ever cracking. That's why the driver was the milestone worth waiting for — and it's genuinely surprising that a direct-to-consumer brand from Sycamore, Illinois got there before the giants. Sub 70's owner told MyGolfSpy the project started almost casually, when their factory mentioned that printing titanium was possible and the team decided to see where it led.

The weld line problem, explained for non-golfers

Here's the manufacturing insight buried in the launch, and it's a good one. A conventional premium driver isn't one part. It's typically a forged titanium face plasma-welded onto a cast titanium body. That weld is not just a production step — it's a design constraint that shapes every driver you've ever hit.

Golf's rules cap head volume (460cc), forgiveness (MOI) and face springiness (CT) — so nobody is allowed to make the center any hotter. What Sub 70's designer Bob Renegar describes doing instead, per the MyGolfSpy interview, is spreading the legal maximum across a much larger area of the face, so off-center hits lose less. In his words:

"That opens the door to new thinking about face design."

— Bob Renegar, Sub 70 design consultant, to MyGolfSpy

Two knock-on effects worth noticing. First, the TAIII 3D is a compact 440cc head, yet Renegar says its face is slightly deeper than a typical 460cc driver's — a couple of millimeters that reportedly help high and low strikes. Second, printing let them sink the hosel connection unusually low in the head, pulling the center of gravity down and toward the heel to suit Sub 70's face-curvature system (they call it ART — a single continuous curvature instead of traditional bulge-and-roll, intended to tame gear-effect curve on mishits). Whether ART itself is a breakthrough is a golf-nerd debate; the point for us is that the geometry only exists because the weld doesn't.

If that "delete the joints, unlock the design" logic sounds familiar, it should — it's the exact reasoning behind printed rocket engine chambers, where consolidating welded assemblies into monolithic parts removes failure points and frees the design. We covered that pattern in depth in SpaceX Prints the Part, Tesla Prints the Mold. Same principle, new industry, considerably better tan lines.

Did it actually work? The tested numbers

Claims are cheap; launch monitors aren't. MyGolfSpy's reviewer (a mid-single-digit handicap swinging around 90–94 mph) ran the TAIII 3D through two sessions — one indoors on a fitting bay, one outdoors on a Flightscope Mevo Gen2 — and published his data. Paraphrasing his readouts:

Smash factor near 1.50 at those speeds is strong, efficient contact. But the detail the reviewer found most persuasive wasn't distance — it was dispersion. The Mevo's impact-location view showed most of his strikes toward the toe, including one well out on it, and those balls stayed near his target line with playable carry instead of diving left. One tester's week with a club is an anecdote, not a lab verdict — MyGolfSpy is careful to frame it that way and so are we — but it's a well-instrumented anecdote pointing the right direction.

Specs, price, and the quiet manufacturing flex

Don't skim past the left-handed line. In conventional club-making, a lefty driver means cutting an entire second set of casting and forging tooling — which is exactly why many models never get a left-handed version at all. A printer has no tooling. Mirror the CAD file, print it. Sub 70 told MyGolfSpy that offering lefties was trivial for precisely this reason, and that's the honest economic headline of additive manufacturing: variants are nearly free. It's also why $549 — pricey for a direct brand, cheap next to $600-plus mainstream flagships — is the number to watch. Printing a titanium head still costs more per unit than casting one. The bet is that skipping tooling, enabling designs welding can't make, and iterating in software closes that gap. Sub 70 has already told MyGolfSpy its next-generation 869 drivers will be printed too, in standard and Max versions.

The San Diego angle: this wave will crest 30 miles from our shop

Here's the part that makes this local news for us. The world's driver R&D is overwhelmingly concentrated in one place: Carlsbad, in north San Diego County — home to TaylorMade, Callaway, and COBRA, plus the ecosystem of shaft, grip and prototyping suppliers around them. COBRA, the company that pioneered printed putters and irons from its Carlsbad HQ, has spent six years proving the process on progressively harder clubs. And MyGolfSpy reports hearing that at least one major OEM will ship printed metalwoods within the next year.

Translation: some of the most demanding thin-wall titanium additive work in consumer products is likely being dialed in right now up the 5 from Carmel Valley. San Diego already punches way above its weight in golf manufacturing employment; if printed metalwoods become the norm, the county's club makers will need additive-fluent engineers, print-farm techs, and post-processing specialists the way they needed CNC machinists a generation ago. For local students and career-changers who ask us whether 3D printing skills lead anywhere — this is where.

What this means if you're not a golf OEM

A fair question: a $549 printed driver exists — so what changes for a maker, inventor, or small business here in San Diego?

The prototyping playbook is now proven in public. Sub 70 didn't invent new physics. They iterated CAD, printed, tested, repeated — with no tooling bill at any step. That exact loop is available to anyone at polymer prices. If you're developing a golf training aid, an alignment gate, a swing-plane tool, a range accessory, or your own better tee, you can go from sketch to on-course testing in days. We already live this: our own carbon-fiber golf tees went through exactly that print-test-revise cycle before they ever hit the sports collection.

Scan-first design just got more relevant. Golf gear is deeply fit-dependent. With a structured-light scanner we can capture an existing object — a grip shape your hands love, a discontinued headcover, a putter head you want a display stand or travel case molded around — and design parts that fit it exactly. That's the same reverse-engineering workflow we use on dead machine parts, pointed at your golf bag.

And metal keeps getting closer to the desktop. It isn't there yet — see our honest breakdown of the GLB DP-C1 "consumer" metal printer — but every product like the TAIII 3D funds the industrial base that eventually trickles down.

FAQ

Sources: MyGolfSpy's TAIII 3D hands-on (July 2026) · Sub 70 · public reporting on COBRA's 3D-printed club line. Specs and pricing as listed at publication; manufacturer performance claims are the manufacturer's.