By Jennifer Gardner
GPA Equipment EditorRobbie Newton, founder and president of RT Technologies, has a challenge.
 Mitch Newton, CEO and Robbie Newton, president of RT Technologies display two of the company's most popular shafts, the Zeus and the Chaos. |
He likes to have hands-on control over his growing shaft company, sorting through and testing each shaft before it goes out the door. But as his company grows, that kind of involvement gets tougher.
"The main thing is really, really high quality control and consistency,” Newton said. “I'm the guy. When everything comes in, I load test everything, check it for CPMs. If it's out of spec, it goes back.
"It takes a long time" to quality check each filament wound shaft, Newton said. "You get to working on them 12 hours a day, not hardly taking a break, you can run through quite a few. If I go at it really hard I can usually do about 400 a day. It takes a while."
But that kind of quality control —RT stands for Rigorously Tested —forms the backbone of RT Technologies, a project that Newton has been working on for almost six years and has just started to make public in the last year. His company's shafts, designed for drivers and hybrids, have already produced wins on the Champions and Nationwide Tours. In less than one full year, the Midas and Zeus shafts have racked up four victories (one a Champions Tour major), 35 top-five finishes and 50 top 10s.
How did this all happen for a small shaft maker based out of Lake Charles, La.?
"I had some contacts on some of the tour vans last year,” Newton said. “They said, 'Well, we like the shafts but we're not going to show any favorites.’ I said, 'Put four or five of them out and just see if they like them.' Well, they went out the first day and they didn't come out of the bag. I was just lucky they gave me an equal-opportunity chance to be used in the tour vans."
The rapid success was actually a painstaking process. Newton, who started learning about club building in his father Mitch's shop, wanted a shaft that performed better than what he could find as a college golfer and then mini-tour professional.
"I just finally decided I was going to try and develop a golf shaft, so I started working on the Zeus,” Newton said. “It took me about a year, year-and-a-half, to run through prototypes and get it to work the way I wanted it to work."
The first step was finding a foundry to work with. Newton said he called and interviewed several, and located one that was willing to work with his specific needs. A lot of back-and-forth work on the prototype shafts followed, with "hundreds" of samples going through his hands.
"I'd say, 'This is what I want the tip to do, this is what I want the butt to do, This is what I want the midsection to be,’” Newton said. “They said 'OK, we're sending you a sample.' So they'd send a sample, I'd bring it over, I might tip it and retrim it, send it back, say, 'OK, I want it to play like this.'
When Newton finally hit on the perfect shaft, he turned his attention to detail on to the graphics and paint colors. It took another two to three months, Newton said, to get that part just right.
"As a club builder the big thing is getting the same product over and over again. You can control the head weight but you can't control this part. So what I decided to do is build something to control the other part," Newton said. "The big thing with these are — I'm not saying they're flawless — but when you rotate them 360 degrees, they deviate no more than one CPM, which is a big deal."
Other shaft companies find deviations of around 20 CPMs acceptable, which has led to the popularity of a process developed by SST Pure called "puring" or "spining," where the shaft is oriented in the most stable position relative to the head.
"I'm not saying not to use the (SST Pure) process. I'm a big believer in the process," Newton said. "What I try to do is build something that you didn't have to (pure). My personal opinion is that they don't have the technology out yet on this planet to make something purely flawless, but this is as close as you can get."
 RT Technologies offers five different shafts: The Midas for hybrids and the Ares (not pictured), Atlas, Chaos and Zeus for drivers and fairway woods. |
Besides tour professionals, other players are taking note of RT Technologies' product line, which currently includes the Ares, Atlas, Zeus, Chaos and Midas shafts. Last year, Adams Golf added the shafts to its upgrade list, meaning that golfers could order a driver or hybrid with an RT Technologies shaft installed. The choice proved popular, and Newton said he'd like to see similar arrangements with other manufacturers.
"We'd like to have that as an option because there are a lot of drivers out there that work very well with our product,” Newton said. “We've got two (manufacturers) who are on the fence right now. But the upgrade-type deals are where I'd like to be at … not necessarily big OEM-type deals. It'd be good, but frankly, I wouldn't want to have to alter my shaft."
This year, the five-employee firm plans to bring its shafts to the PGA, European and LPGA tours, expand its small network of distributors (currently 15 in the U.S. and one in Australia) and make its target audience of clubfitters more aware of the RT product line.
"Some companies have million-dollar advertising budgets," Newton said. "I'd rather dump our money into the shaft and keep a cult movement going, just produce the best product we can. I like to be able to check every shaft myself. If i pay someone to check the shaft, they might not check it the way I check it.
"It's not that I wouldn't like to get big, that's be great. If we can get big and make a great product, that'd be fine."
