About a month ago, I saw a facebook add advertising “The Folf Club, a new twist on disc golf.” I had to try it out.
The Folf club is like a hand clay pigeon thrower for golf discs. It’s simply a plastic device that uses leverage to launch discs.
I had my doubts about how well this product would work, but was really hoping that it would make it easy to throw a disc for more than 400 feet. My max throw ever with my arm is about 370. I was hoping this would be a game changer to disc golf.
My wish did not come true.
My folf club came in the mail as I was leaving for a Memorial weekend camping trip. I grabbed a few discs to test it out in the mountains (mostly very overstable high speed drivers thinking that they would need to be overstable to handle all the torque it would produce) and hopped in the car for my long drive. Having the launcher by my side only made the long drive more painful, as I longed to try this new toy out.
After about five driving hours, we finally got to our campground in the Ruby mountains. As we arrived at our campground, there were no open fields nearby, so I decided I would launch some discs against the mountain side. Setting up camp could wait.
I loaded the disc, stepped back, and let it rip…..
My disc sputtered out pre-maturely and drifted about 30 feet to the right. Not a good first impression.
It soon became apparent that “slippery” champion plastic discs were not going to work in this thing.
After trying several discs, I finally found one that somewhat worked – a DX Leopard. Now the Leopard was a little small in Diameter, but with a gentle throw, I could actually make the disc spin evenly and fly. I had enough testing for now and set the club down to get my tent set up. Until I had a wide open field, and some better discs, testing just wouldn’t really work.
My seven year old wanted to try the club, and he had a great first throw with the thing. With the launcher he was able to get 3-4 times more distance than he can throwing by himself. His next few attempts at throwing didn’t work so well.
Finally when I got home I was able to adequately test the Folf Club out. Here are a few things I figured out:
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- Throwing accurately with the Folf Club takes practice. It took me a while before I could regularly get discs to release properly. Even now I sometimes have errors and am only marginally accurate.
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- Very few discs actually work well with the Folf Club. Initially I thought that high speed overstable drivers would work best. After trying dozens of discs I finally found a few that worked well. Mid speed wide diameter discs in basic grade plastics performed best. The Lightning #1 Hyzer, #3 Slice, #2 Hookshot, #3 Hyzer, and #3 Flyer all worked very well, along with the Innova Viper. Overstable discs worked well when releasing on a slight anhyzer angle, while the understable #3 Slice worked well when released at a slight hyzer angle.
- Max distance is not what I had hoped for. My max distance throws with the Folf Club were about 270 feet. This is good for a begginning disc golfer, but I can throw farther without a club. Perhaps if the Folf Club was more accommodating to smaller diameter drivers, you could get more distance.
While this is a fun device to launch discs with, it’s definitely not something that is going to revolutionize disc golf. I had my fun testing it out, but will likely not try and use it again for a very long time.
