How to Clean Golf Balls

Why Clean Your Balls?

Clean balls fly truer, faster, and farther. That’s why you find scrubbing devices beside the tees at any golf course worth a sod. In fact, unless you’re a true obsessive compulsive – the cleaning your Maxflite gets in one of those golf course scrubbing stations is probably all you need.

But let’s say your hobby is patrolling golf courses, including the water hazards, for lost, forgotten, abandoned balls. At the end of the day, you may end up with a hundred scuffed, muddy balls, some of them marked for identification with felt-tip pens. How do you clean all those?

The easiest way to clean golf balls:

Put them in the dishwasher or washing machine. They shouldn’t damage the machinery. Should this kind of hot-water washing harm any of the balls, they weren’t in good shape to begin with.

Cleaning Really Dirty Golf Balls

If this doesn’t get the gunk off (balls that have been in water and are partially covered with mold or algae may be tough customers), here are a few more suggestions:

• Soak them briefly in a product containing oxalic acid.
• Apply undiluted bleach, ammonia, OR white vinegar (but DON’T mix ANY of these chemicals together if you value your life – poison gas is produced).
• Throw a bunch of them in a concrete mixer along with crushed peanut or almond shells and let them spin around for a while.
• Put them in a container with water and throw in a couple of denture cleaning tablets.

As for getting ink off of them, use nail polish remover.