Hidden gems from the 2016 Golf Industry Show

With almost 13,000 attendees, it can be easy to miss a product helpful to a superintendent among the sea of more than 500 booths at the 2016 Golf Industry Show in San Diego.

It doesn’t matter if you sailed west to the show or were stranded at home, because the S.S. Golfdom scoured the ocean of big fish exhibitors all the way down to the tidal pools of guppy booths for products that can aid superintendents.

Baroness GM2810

It doesn’t have a U.S. address, but it looks just like a Baroness

The U.K. was on the floor of the Golf Industry Show in San Diego with a number of products that superintendents “over there” have seen before but are new to this side of the pond.

Perhaps chief among them for the U.K.-based company Baroness was the GM2810, a five-unit mower that is the company’s “premium” ride-on rotary, boasting five rotary decks that individually follow hilly terrains and slopes.

The big selling point, according to Stuart Gray of Baroness, is the sheer variety of areas in which the unit can operate, including around bunkers and trees, where other big mowers have a hard time.

The company says the GM2810 has the widest cutting width in its class while rivaling the turn radius and mobility of smaller mowers.

The unit’s climbing ability comes from a Kubota large displacement turbo clean engine and original hydraulic circuit drive system, which makes embankment mowing much easier, the company says.

Even the design makes a statement, the company says, and is inspired by Japanese swords to express “sharp cut” and “agility.” The 4,585-pound unit cuts 4.9 acres per hour.

Asked to sum up the GM2810’s advantages, the Hampshire-based Gray said the task is easy. “Ease of maintenance, quality of cut. It’s got the most horsepower in its class of any of unit in its market, and it has a standard three-year warranty, which is a year more than any other manufacturer.” In addition, he noted that “the average
blade life for a Baroness, for a rough mower, is a thousand hours.”

Sweeping sand without the broom

PrecisionUSA’s The “Original” Green Sweep

When it comes to various golf course maintenance practices like topdressing, there are plenty of fish in the sea. The “Original” Green Sweep could be lost among the school of products grouped along with it in the PrecisionUSA booth because it has a simple look, but it yields very visible results.

This product allows superintendents to reduce turf stress and help get sand down into the soil when topdressing. Its goal is to reduce stress caused by dragging chain drag mat or brush behind a cart, and saving time compared to a group of crew members using brooms to work the sand into the soil, says the company.

It’s 24 inches long with a 5.5-inch by 5.5-inch opening that attaches with existing hardware to most walk-behind blowers with a rectangular output port and can be used on putting greens, tee boxes and approaches.

A seal is created between this product and the blower that directs the air pressure through a specifically designed set of holes and forces the sand down in the soil. If a user quickly needs to user the blower for it’s intended function, the “Original” Green Sweep folds up and can be held in place with a bungee cord.

A welcome Oasis on the course

Cushman’s Refresher Oasis.

If you traversed the Golf Industry Show trade show floor in San Diego and happened to come upon something with a cooler, glass-doored cupboards and enough counter space for a small kitchen, don’t worry, you didn’t wander into a model house boat. What you were taking that cold drink from was the new Cushman Refresher Oasis, designed and manufactured by Textron.

The company’s latest entry into its food-and-beverage and point-of-sale vehicle line features four beverage compartments with a mammoth 500-can capacity. The Oasis was designed for facilities needing a large-volume vehicle, and if it had been around a few decades ago you might have been tempted to live in one. Pretty sure the company wouldn’t recommend that, though.

The Oasis provides “another opportunity to increase revenue through on-course beverage and merchandise sales,” according to Michael R. Parkhurst, vice president, golf, for Textron Specialized Vehicles. “Its ability to carry large loads makes it an ideal solution for on-course refreshments, supporting large tournaments and special events.”

The model is the latest in Cushman’s Refresher line. Besides the can capacity, it boasts a 12.1-square- foot wraparound counter, convenient trash and recycling receptacles and a 6.7-cubic foot merchandising/dry goods cabinet (the glass-doored cupbpoards mentioned earlier). Courses have the option of adding airpots in which to serve morning or afternoon beverages, and customers can order the Oasis, counter, refresher unit and canopy in optional colors.

The Refresher Oasis joins the FS2 and FS4 in the Refresher product line. Both of those models have what Cushman calls “FlexServe Technology,” which gives courses the flexibility to change merchandising modules.

Plugging up the bunker leaks

The Polylast Bunker Liner, made out of 100-percent recycled rubber and proprietary urethanes, is for superintendents looking for environmentally friendly solution for leaks in the hull of their bunkers.
According to Polylast’s Pete Laurence, the company has a patented process of encapsulating recycled rubber with a pretreatment of chemicals that when bound with urethane becomes extremely strong, “stronger than almost anything else.”

Polylast improves water flow to drain systems in bunkers, Laurence says, to prevent flooding and washout while protecting sand from migrating rocks and dirt from the native subsurface.
The prefabricated liner is delivered ready to install, and requires only the placement of the preformed pads. The seams can be stapled or glued together.

“We pre-form the pads, which are three-eighths of an inch think, at our facility and ship them,” he says. “Installation is done by picking up a pad or a roll, laying it in the bunker, butting the edges, and some people like to use staples, some don’t, then using a binder to seal the edges.”

Take control with YamaTrack

Yamaha’s new GPS solution, YamaTrack.

If you have ever wanted to control your golf carts like Poseidon controls the seven seas, you should consider Yamaha’s new GPS solution, YamaTrack.

With Yamatrack, golf course professionals can track and control the entire fleet of golf carts from an iPhone or computer. Yamaha developed this internet-based facility management software with iGolf which allows users to see exactly where each golf cart is on the course and tell if a group is falling behind in pace of play through color distinctions.

For areas in which a superintendent doesn’t want carts traffic, there is a geofencing function to help implement that rule. This feature automatically sends a custom message to the intruding cart and can even control how fast the cart will accelerate until it exits. If one starts to leave the property, a geofence can be drawn that shuts down the cart entirely.

The app also has a report tool that can give the user statistics on individual carts or the entire fleet. For example, it can provide how many rounds have been played monthly and annually or how many amps an individual cart has used in a day.

photo courtesy : Cushman & Grant B. Gannon, Ed Hiscock