The Wedge Guy: Understanding iron designs, Part 2

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As promised, here is the follow-up to last week’s post about understanding iron designs. Today, I’m going to tell you what to look for as you try to figure out which iron best suits your type of play and is most likely to deliver the performance you seek. Oh, and these principles apply to wedges as well.

Let me begin with a historical observation.

Up until the introduction of the first mainstream cavity back/perimeter-weighted irons, the entire market was limited to some type of forged blade design. Across the entire spectrum of brands and models, there were only subtle nuanced differences from one to the other. Some featured some kind of “muscle back”, where the mass was concentrated low in the clubhead and the shaping formed a sort of crescent on the back of the club, the majority of mass being in the center of the clubhead (from heel to toe). Others spread that mass more evenly across the back of the clubhead (i.e. the Hogan designs), while others shaped their back to provide a bit more mass toward the toe, as in the traditional Wilson Staff models.

Then the “revolution” came with the Ping Eye 2 and all its copies. These early cavity-back designs moved much of the mass to the extreme perimeter of the clubhead, leaving a thin face, which delivered a high degree of forgiveness of off-center hits, but also deteriorated the consistent distance control delivered by the traditional forged blades. They also launched the ball much higher, making long- and mid-irons much easier to hit, but compromising the traditional precision of shorter irons.

Golfers had to make choice between shotmaking precision and forgiveness of mishits.

This design “revolution” also set in motion the continual strengthening of lofts in the shorter clubs to where we are today when “P-clubs” can be as low as 42 degrees – a far cry from what a true “pitching wedge” must be. See my post on that here.

The one thing in common with both of these approaches to iron design was that “what you see is what you get.” There were no internal technologies, so a visual examination of the clubhead could tell you pretty much how that iron was going to play.

As iron technologies have advanced, many radical designs have come and gone, but the performance of the traditional blade and the traditional cavity-back remain. Modern technologies allow much more precision in making iron heads, and multi-material construction has given club designers much more freedom to explore and refine performance, but these principles of iron head design are constant. For the most part, the golf ball will react to how a clubhead’s mass is distributed and where its CG is located. Period.

Understand that for each clubhead number or loft, the weight of the clubhead does not vary by more than a few grams from model to model to model. The designers’ challenge is to position that finite amount of mass in such a way as to achieve the performance goals for that particular model. So, here are the parameters designers have to consider, and that you can consider when looking for a new set of irons:

To begin, golf ball performance is determined by how much mass will be directly behind various points of impact on the face. The reason blade designs are still preferred by the best shotmakers is that these designs put mass directly behind the point of impact with the ball, thereby giving the golfer the maximum ability to control distance, trajectory, and shape of the shot.

Conversely, if the area behind the strike zone is thin, the club will likely be “hotter” but distance consistency will be compromised.

If a large portion of the mass is positioned lower in the clubhead, that design will launch higher, and likely with less spin. While this might be desirable in the lower lofts; high launch and low spin are probably not what you want in your higher-lofted scoring clubs, say those over 37-39 degrees, and particularly not with your wedges.

If mass is concentrated in the center of the clubhead from heel to toe, center strikes will be extremely solid and repeatable, but misses toward the toe will be more compromised than a design that has the mass more evenly distributed across the entire clubhead.

If some of the mass is distributed toward the low toe area, that club will be more forgiving of toe mis-hits.Thin, fast faces and hollow or foam-filled construction is the rage now, but the trade-off is losing some distance precision in exchange for more distance (which comes from higher launch and less spin).

Another modern development is the use of heavy tungsten inserts low in the clubhead, which adds to the higher loft and lower spin distance formula – that might be desirable in the longer irons, but that’s exactly the opposite of what you want in the scoring clubs.

Big wide soles were more the rage a while back than they are now, but the wider the sole, the lower the mass distribution, so the higher the launch angle and the lower the spin. And these super wide sole designs are not very good for tighter turf conditions.

All golf clubhead designs are bound by two distinct principles – gear effect and smash factor.

Gear effect determines the trajectory and spin the golf ball will take. The higher the clubhead mass is distributed (i.e. blade designs), the lower the ball flight and higher the spin rates. Likewise, the more mass that is distributed toward the toe or heel from the strike point, the more likely the ball will curve back to the center.

Smash factor is the efficiency of transfer of clubhead speed to ball speed. Every club has one perfect point of impact that maximizes smash factor and that transfer of energy begins to deteriorate as impact is moved away from that point. That’s why you get occasional “heaters” off most thin-faced irons and see significant distance loss on more traditional blades. It’s also why those high-face misses with traditional wedge designs just pop-up with greatly reduced distance and spin.

I hope this has been enlightening and helpful.

Mastering the art of putting: Decoding the go-by numbers

Terry Koehler is a fourth generation Texan and a graduate of Texas A&M University. Over his 40-year career in the golf industry, he has created over 100 putter designs, sets of irons and drivers, and in 2014, he put together the team that reintroduced the Ben Hogan brand to the golf equipment industry. Since the early 2000s, Terry has been a prolific writer, sharing his knowledge as “The Wedge Guy”. But his most compelling work is in the wedge category. Since he first patented his “Koehler Sole” in the early 1990s, he has been challenging “conventional wisdom” reflected in ‘tour design’ wedges. The performance of his wedge designs have stimulated other companies to move slightly more mass toward the top of the blade in their wedges, but none approach the dramatic design of his Edison Forged wedges, which have been robotically proven to significantly raise the bar for wedge performance. Terry serves as Chairman and Director of Innovation for Edison Golf – check it out at www.EdisonWedges.com.

D

Aug 31, 2023 at 10:00 am

“And these super wide sole designs are not very good for tighter turf conditions.”Not true!!! How do people hit FW and Hybrids then? Massive soles! Duh

OP is a Donkey

Aug 31, 2023 at 11:50 am

Hybrids and fairway woods are not irons…. you are trying to compare apples to bowling balls. Completely different design.

D

Aug 31, 2023 at 1:21 pm

Er, it’s just a club, with a SOLE. Look at the size of the soles! How do we hit those off tight lies! Wow! lmao you eejit. We even manage to hit 460cc driver off the deck, duh

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Putting is an essential aspect of the game of golf that can often make or break a player’s performance on the green. According to putting genius Geoff Mangum, the pursuit of the perfect putt is evasive because of poor information.

Most golfers believe that when putting, good advice is “never up, never in.” As a result many putts are hit well past the hole. It is these putts that most often result in 3-putts.

Instinctive delivery speed at the hole instead of trying to hit past, the best advice for putters is to try and die the ball into the front of the cup using practical and effective capture speed. Mangum teaches this ball “delivery speed” by teaching how instinctive “touch” is performed.

Geoff tells students “The brain science is that perception and intentionality to the space of the hole invokes the correct size stroke (with a stable tempo and rhythm) so the motion physics matches the putt’s physics on the green.”

The intentionality includes imagining the putt with final ball speed at the hole for the ball having time to drop safely in the cup even on the edge paths but not go too far past in case of a miss. Also, it means that the hole is as big as reasonable when the ball is rolling towards it. The bigger the hole, the more putts go in!

The confusion surrounding go-by distances partly stems from Dave Pelz’s methodology and his claims. It appears that Pelz’s data on capture speed, published in Golf Digest in July 1977, does not consider the stimp or slope and contradicts his claim that 17 inches past the hole is best for all putts.

In practice, players should work on delivering the ball with a consistent speed, both uphill and downhill. According to Mangum, “Even at optimal delivery speed of 2-3 rps, a rare few outliers will be short due to unavoidable human variability. But this also means intending a delivery speed of 1 rps in light of normal variability greatly increases the number of putts that miss short.” And 4 rps can work but is risky for slick downhill putts going too far past.

The faster the ball is traveling at the cup, the less effective size of the cup and the farther the comeback putt. There are many factors, including stimp and slope, but in general, if the ball travels more than 2.5 feet (30 inches) past the hole, it probably would have needed to hit the center to have much of a chance of going in.

When practicing putting, players need to work on their touch. According to Mangum, the first step is to stabilize a relaxed tempo and a same-same back and through rhythm.

The next step for instinctive touch is to appreciate how stroke size causes distance on the day’s particular green speed. To calibrate, putt “three balls with the same size stroke and the stable tempo-twice swinging rhythm. A typical size for this might be a stroke a little larger than the stance so the backstroke goes a few inches past the rear foot.” These putts will go a certain distance, perhaps 10 feet. This step calibrates green speed to the player’s tempo- rhythm, and using the same “core putt” every time allows comparing different green speeds on different greens or days.

The final step is to test instinctive sizing. Toss a “rabbit” ball around 30 feet away. Then intend for the putted “hound” ball to go the same distance and just “kiss” the rabbit ball. Find out if this process causes the instincts to size the stroke correctly.

With instinctive touch, the player “sizes” the stable tempo-rhythm by intending the delivery speed at the hole.

Over time, the final ball pace at the hole becomes correlated with a stable tempo-rhythm instinctively sized. The player then simply relies on the stable tempo-rhythm and target intentionality for a consistent great delivery pace.

Such “skillful” know-how enables the player to know what flaws in touch cause long or short (too slow or too fast a pace to the hole):

With this steady feedback from diagnosing errors, touch steadily improves for accuracy and consistency.

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As we all know, the universe of iron designs is immensely diverse, with nearly every brand offering at least three or four models of each of their lines and changing the cosmetics or even the line names every couple of years — even if ever-so-slightly. There is simply no way any golfer can know much about any of them, much less enough to make an informed decision as to which models you should be considering, given your individual preferences for brand, appearance, and performance.

Even in the complex and thorough fitting environment that is growing exponentially, how is one supposed to make an intelligent decision about which model is most likely to deliver what you are really seeking? Hopefully, this two-part series can shed some light on this complex environment and simplify the process for you.

I will begin by stating that I am trying to be brand-agnostic with this topic. While I favor certain brands over others for various reasons, it is simply not realistic to say that “X” company builds the best irons and “Y” company builds the worst. Every major brand and many minor ones are producing top-quality golf clubs — “bad” products simply cannot make it in the marketplace, whether you’re talking golf clubs or balls, fly rods, shotguns, automobiles, cell phones, it really doesn’t matter. “Bad” products are rejected by consumers and go away, while good ones usually continue to enjoy success (though that’s not always so).

What makes choosing irons so challenging is that within each brand’s line-up is a wide range of design concepts, each one purporting to deliver a given package of performance. While one of the major brands limits its iron selection to just four models, another “top five” company has no less than fourteen, not counting mix-and-match combo sets. All the others fall somewhere in between.

But in spite of all the differences, I believe the entire spectrum of iron models can be reduced to four basic “types” of irons, with each having its strengths and weaknesses. Within each of the four basic types of irons, you can find an almost endless array of brands and models, with the biggest differences being in cosmetics, not performance. So, here is how I see the four basic categories and the strengths and weaknesses of each:

In the simplest of iron design analysis, what you see is what you will get. The trick is knowing what to look for, and I’ll get into that next week.

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One of the most important elements of optimizing your scoring range performance is to get consistent and reliable distance gapping in your prime scoring clubs. For this discussion, I’m referring to all your clubs of about 37-38 degrees of loft and higher.

The first challenge is to determine exactly which club in your set has that loft. If you have recently purchased a new set of irons, it could be very different from your last set. When I was a teenager in the 1960s, playing Hogan blade irons, that club would have had a “6” on the bottom. As iron technologies led to the constant strengthening of lofts, that migrated to a “7”, then to an “8”. But in many of the iron sets on the market today, that loft falls between the “8” and “9” irons.

The fact is, regardless of the number on the bottom of the club, when you get in range to hit shots with an iron of this loft or higher, you should consider yourself in prime scoring position. With those clubs, you should be hitting shots with a repeating, penetrating trajectory, reasonably consistent carry distance, and enough spin to hold the greens. And that’s where I see many of the modern irons being deficient.As I explained in an earlier post, the “launch monitor wars” have inspired iron brands to create ever higher launching and lower spinning 6-irons and 7-irons. And with few exceptions, that thin face, low CG, higher launch, lower spinning design is then applied all the way through the set. But that doesn’t produce the shot trajectories, consistent distance and spin characteristics you want in your prime scoring clubs.

I guess that takes us to the recurring question of, “How many wedges should I carry?”

The correct answer is different for every golfer, of course, but it is always the same:

“Carry as many wedges as it takes to give you consistent and controllable distance differentials from that first scoring iron all the way down to your shortest ‘full swing’ wedge.”

I put “full swing” in quotes, because a full swing with a wedge should be throttled back to about 85 percent of what you consider a full swing with a 6- or 7-iron. That will give you more penetrating trajectory, more consistent impact, and therefore, more consistent distance and spin.

Back to the gapping question, there are two ways to arrive at what is best for you and your game. And you should be regularly re-visiting and evaluating your gapping as you get new irons or work on improving your technique.

If you have access to a quality launch monitor, you can work through the higher-loft end of your bag to get accurate and repeatable carry distances and spin rates for each of your prime scoring clubs. I highly recommend you do this outdoors with your regular game ball. You should be seeking 10- to 12-yard differentials in that range, so that you can reliably select the iron or wedge that will fly the desired distance without much swing manipulation.

The other method requires you to have access to a relatively level hole on the golf course or a vacant field that is large enough for the exercise. If on the golf course, set up in the middle of a par 5 or par-4 hole, and hit down the fairway, NOT to the green.

Start out by hitting a half-dozen shots with your 8-iron, then take your 9-iron and wedges and walk down to the short center of the pattern of balls. To determine that actual distance, you can take your laser range finder and shoot the distance back to your bag from that pattern, or you can step off the distance. Make a note of the distance.

Then hit shots back toward your starting point with your 9-iron and note the distance difference to the center of the pattern from your starting point. Repeat this back-and-forth process, making your notes until you have worked through all your wedges.

If you see gaps that are excessively smaller or larger than that ideal ten to twelve yards, you can adjust your loft gapping and/or shaft length slightly to open or close them to your goal.

The key to better scoring is, in prime conditions, to know your distances to the letter with all your high-loft clubs, whether they be wedges or short irons. And this exercise is well worth the investment of time.

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