Nothing is meant to reach steel because it’s fashionable. The aim is for it to reach steel because it held up through the loop.
Start from the miss
001 began as an error budget, not a shape.
Published aim-study literature is blunt about where putts die: misaim of a degree or more at address is commonly reported among golfers, well inside a tolerance a straight twelve-foot putt can't afford. That's context from the literature, not an OURO test result — but it set the design brief for 001 backwards from the miss: give the player's eyes the best possible chance of setting the face square before the stroke ever begins.
Perception is the first constraint
Before a single curve was drawn, we mapped the visual problem. How eye dominance shifts perceived line. How parallax moves an aim point when the eyes sit inside or outside the ball. How contrast and edge geometry pull the gaze. That map — not styling — set the head's proportions, the topline treatment, and the candidate sightline systems now under study.
The alignment system on 001 is not being finalized by opinion. The first study has already run: a geometry screening across bare heads — no sightline, no mark — found wing forward-sweep angle to be the dominant geometric influence on where golfers aim at address. That result informs 001's current CAD direction and starting geometry, which remains subject to prototype evaluation, design-for-manufacture, sightline testing, and further validation before anything is called final. The write-up, charts included, lives in the journal. Next, candidate sightline configurations go through a controlled aim study on that starting geometry: face angle at address, measured in degrees, across real golfers, compared against benchmark putters. Whether a given configuration measurably improves static aim is the question that study is designed to answer — not an outcome assumed in advance.
Sound is a specification
Impact sound and post-impact vibration are believed to be major contributors to perceived feel. Impact is understood to last under half a millisecond — likely too brief for the hand alone to resolve — while the ear can pick up considerably more detail in the strike. So 001 treats sound as a design variable worth measuring, not an afterthought. Prototype heads will have their acoustic signatures measured — spectrum, loudness, decay — with the geometry and milling adjusted toward a sound that reflects the strike rather than dresses it up: the aim is for center strikes to sound like center strikes.
Why milling is the plan
001 is a mallet, machined from solid billet. The current development plan is to cut the critical surfaces — face, sightlines, engraving — in a single setup, a proposed manufacturing approach intended to hold the geometry the aim study is meant to validate. A sightline that drifts in manufacturing could undermine the research behind it, which is why dimensional inspection against the drawing will be verified before production.
First articles will come off the machine, get measured against the drawing, and the numbers will land on this page — tolerances included. Until then, every figure above is labeled for what it is: a target.
What happens next
The loop runs: aim-study of the alignment system, first billet prototypes, acoustic measurement, player testing. Each pass updates this page. No number appears here until it's been measured.