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about them, heard that Richard Windows was waxing lyrically about them at St Andrews, and Henry believed in them, but seeing is believing.
Being smooth
While all this was going on Dr Christian Spring, also of the STRI, contacted the club to see if we would help the STRI research bods to calibrate the smoothness meter. For this Christian wanted to take measurements of the smoothness of the greens before and after mowing, and before and after aeration, to determine the overall time taken to restore the greens smoothness to before aeration. In conjunction we were able
to borrow a set of the Select-A- Vibe vibratory rollers from GreenTek to assess alongside the trueness meter. Our thanks go to them for being so kind.
The effect of the rollers was quite amazing. By aerating the greens (9mm solid tines) we increased the uneveness by over 100% - so much for minimal disturbance!! But, double cutting after aeration reduced the disruption to 35%. By cutting once and rolling once we removed all unevenness back to the original levels. These results really charged the imagination. Could we improve the speed and the smoothness of the greens by using these rollers?
During the autumn of that year a trial was agreed between Henry, Christian, ourselves and GreenTek, on the basis of obtaining the vibratory rollers to gain credible data to fully assess the impact that regular use of
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these rollers would have on the speed of our greens.
The proof of the pudding
To that end we were allowed to have a set of vibrating rollers and machine for the month of August 2008. Christian returned every week or so to record the impact upon smoothness, and carried out daily stimpmeter readings. I’m sure I won’t need to
remind anyone that August’s weather was appalling, not what we had hoped for at all. In fact we had twenty-five days of rainfall during August, giving a grand total of 142mm, when the average is 20-40mm.
The only difference in our management programme was that the greens were cut at 4.5mm, instead of the 5mm for 2007. Nevertheless, on 4th August the trial began. During the first week we aimed to see just how fast we could get them. The answer was too fast, for some. With the daily use of the vibrating rollers, plus the occasional double cut, the greens speed increased on average by 2ft, some greens by more. We had all of our greens at well over 9ft. This may not sound too fast, but the greens we have do possess very prominent cross slopes on them and we had to be careful not to over do it. We then scaled back the intensity of the rolling and cutting in the following three weeks, partly due to the weather and the fact that the greens retained some of their pace even if we missed a day or two. For the rest of the month we managed to attain all of the greens to a near consistent 9.25ft.
As for the all-important
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