On boxing’s most famous night, deep in the African continent, one of its most exciting fighters deploys a tactic designed to absorb the heaviest hitter of his generation.
Muhammad Ali, perhaps the greatest to ever grace the ring, is leant back against the ropes as punches from world heavyweight champion George Foreman rain down on him. To most watching on, it is as one-sided a fight as you ever could see. Until, that is, Ali springs from the ropes in the eighth round to floor a tired, cumbersome Foreman and regain the titles he was stripped of some seven years earlier.
As enthralling a fight and a fighter, most people who put on a pair of boxing gloves don’t do so with the intention of enduring what Ali did or inflicting what Ali did. But in the famous rope-a-dope tactic, there is inspiration to be found.
Boxing, like many sports, is about maintaining the perfect balance between offence and defence. In defence, a fighter needs to be as adept at absorbing the force of a punch as their gloves are when throwing them. Hayabusa, a leading combat sports equipment manufacturer, can do little to prepare its customers for the former but takes pride in doing so for the latter.
The company has recently partnered with Carbon to incorporate its 3D printed lattice technology into the T3D boxing glove. Retailing at 349 USD, users of this product are pretty much exclusively trainers as opposed to fighters, so are only interested in protecting their fists as punches land on a bag or pad. Back in Ali’s era, horsehair was used as padding at the top and the front of boxing gloves, affording fighters a harsher punch, but exposing their hands to more damage. In the decades since, high-density foam has been used in combination with, or in place of, horsehair to provide enhanced comfort and protection to hands. But Hayabusa has seen an opportunity to push things forward once more.
Through its patented Dual-X dual strap interlocking closure technology, Hayabusa has already applied its focus to addressing deviations of the wrist as punches land. Next on its agenda was protecting the fist.
“We realized that we needed proper technologies to address the fundamentals of a boxing glove,” Hayabusa CEO Ken Clement told TCT. “Our closure system and protection are bang on, now what about under the hood, the nuts and bolts of a boxing glove? It matters as far as what material is used; what configuration is used? What is the perfect way to select materials and incorporate them within a boxing glove? And not only protect [the hand], but it has to feel very comfortable for a user whether they’re striking a pad, whether they’re hitting a punching bag.”
The verve to embark on this evolution came after an extensive assessment of how gloves are put together today; Clement described gloves in which the foam had been ‘poorly Frankensteined’ together. Hayabusa put them to the test, assessing the gloves in a series of strike cycles to determine how striking performance changes over time. The finding was the denser the foam, the longer the characteristics remain intact.
As Hayabusa was making these inroads, Carbon was doing some outreach. The 3D printing company has made a name for itself in the sports equipment and consumer goods industries, through collaborations with the likes of Adidas, Riddell, and CCM Hockey. In boxing gloves, it had identified another opportunity to replace existing foam liners with its printed lattice capability, and a company that prided itself on innovation. The two companies found each other at just the right time.
“As we looked to incorporate [lattice] within the glove, you can do zonal precise changes of the cross structure of the geometries to get the best of all worlds so you don’t have to Frankenstein foam anymore – you can print it in a one-piece insert and get everything you need,” Clement said.
What Hayabusa needed was a liner with energy-dampening capabilities. Giving guidance to Carbon, the 3D printing company would then utilize its Design Engine software to design the lattice structure, implementing softer and harder areas of the liner as directed by Hayabusa. Carbon selected the Voronoi lattice structure and the EPU 43 material for their aptitude in dampening and slowing down impact, with Hayabusa wanting the forces that are sent to the knuckle to be stifled.
“The intended primary goal was to increase the amount of protection, so decrease the amount of force transferred to the knuckles,” Jim Sauerbaum, Business Development Director at Carbon, explained. “The secondary benefit was after the completion of the cycle testing, the drop off in the amount of force that was absorbed was better using the lattice than it was using the more traditional foam or horsehair components. So, you get a durability benefit and an increase in protection by moving over to the lattice.”
Working with Hayabusa, Carbon developed a specified latticing workflow driven by considerations like stressstrain curves and meta-material modulus, with the Design Engine software returning several lattice options based on such characteristics. The 3D printing company would then factor in things like weight. Boxing gloves are typically sold in standard weights that increase by two ounces (10oz, 12oz, 14oz, and so on), meaning Carbon had to always be cognizant of the weight of the printed liners.
“We were saying, ‘we want a certain stiffness within a certain volume fraction that would equate to a certain weight,’ and then the software provides that output of the lattice and our engineers will take feedback in and tweak it,” Sauerbaum said. “But you’re going to be changing the cell shape, the cell size, and the strut diameter, and then the brand will say where the location may need to change.”
The printed lattice liner for Hayabusa’s T3D gloves features two layers of lattice, with a softer inner layer to cradle the knuckles, and a set of bigger struts on the outside to provide more structure and spread the impact out across the shells as a punch is landed. These liners cover the majority of the top of the hand, running from above the wrist to the fingertips. The thumb is not covered by the lattice liner because this is an area that does not experience a lot of impact, and it also would have added complexity to the printing process because of its shape. As a more conventional four-sided shape, Carbon can print eight glove liners per build on the company’s L1 machine, with each print run taking between two to three hours.
Having distributed the latticed pads to Hayabusa, the company put the T3D gloves through an extensive testing process. This process leant on a mechanical rig developed by Hayabusa to assess durability and force transmission across thousands of strikes, before also retrieving qualitative data from a select group of trainers and athletes. All the data has been promising, with Hayabusa now exploring other product ranges that can be enhanced by 3D printed lattices.
“Lattice was a holy grail moment,” Clement finished. “This material came along and checked off every box, and it’s almost like ‘this is too good to be true.’ Seeing the data, and the results come out, just reaffirmed things at every stage.
“It takes a company to show what can be done and we intend to be that company. As it gets adopted as the new standard, and when people fully appreciate how lightyears ahead lattice is versus foam, the adoption becomes more and more prevalent. When the tidal wave hits as far as ‘this is what a protective piece of equipment should be’ in, specifically, a boxing glove, I think the world’s eyes will open and say this is the new standard that everybody should adopt.”
