News

Jul 12, 2023

Tour Edge's new Exotics iron line: What you need to know

New irons BRIAN MACDONALD WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW: Tour Edge’s latest Exotics iron line features the C723 for a more accomplished player and uses a hollow-body design and L-face to create speed, while

New irons

BRIAN MACDONALD

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW: Tour Edge’s latest Exotics iron line features the C723 for a more accomplished player and uses a hollow-body design and L-face to create speed, while the E723 uses weighting out on the toe to, in effect, expand the sweet spot. Two other irons inspired by the company’s tour staff—the Pro 723 Forged and BL Proto—are aimed at players who find face center more frequently than most.

PRICE/AVAILABILITY: Cost for the C723 irons is $130 per iron in steel and $145 per iron in graphite. The E723 is $100 per iron in steel and $115 per iron in graphite. The Pro 723 Forged goes for $170 per iron and is available in steel only. All will be available at retail March 1. No price or release date has been set for the BL Proto irons at this time.

3 Cool Things

1. An iron for competitionAs it is aimed at better players, the C723 received a makeover with a clubhead shape that is 5 percent smaller through a shorter blade length and thinner topline. The compact shape, however, belies the fact there is serious horsepower as this iron features a maraging-steel L-face cup where part of the face wraps around the sole of the club to generate added face flex on shots struck low on the face.

That face, which also uses a diamond-face variable thickness pattern, also is thinner on the heel and toe areas (just 2.1 millimeters). “That helped reduce the face weight by 2.5 grams due to thinning some of the diamond shapes,” said Matt Neely, Tour Edge’s vice president of product development. The face is plasma welded to the 17-4 stainless-steel body creating a hollow-body design where the face has room to flex.

The use of the “Vibrcor” thermoplastic urethane inside the head helps damp the sound and eliminate the slight “click” sound that was found on the C722 model.

2. E is for everyone The E723 builds upon its predecessor with many of the same base technologies yet several significant enhancements. Chief among them was a change to a one-piece casting that is akin to a hollow-body iron. That allowed for more of the thermoplastic urethane to be injected inside the clubhead in the lower portion of the face.

Dual toe weighting moves weight in a manner that has the effect of expanding the sweet spot and boosting the moment of inertia, helping to mitigate the loss of ball speed on shots struck out on the toe.

For the face, Tour Edge continues with its diamond-face variable-thickness design in which different-sized diamond shapes act as mini-trampolines to foster higher ball speeds across a wider portion of the face, including reduced thickness in the heel and toe areas to mitigate the loss of ball speed on off-center strikes.

BRIAN MACDONALD

3. Pros only (including Bernhard)In addition to the two mainstream irons, Tour Edge has two additional irons borne out of feedback from its tour staff, with one relying almost exclusively on the desires of its flagship player, Bernhard Langer.

More on that iron in a bit. First, the Exotics Pro 723 Forged is a slightly larger forged cavity-back with a shape better players could appreciate.

After forging, each iron in the set takes more than an hour to go through the CNC milling process to ensure tight tolerances on the face and grooves. The heel and toe pockets in the cavity are also CNC milled to offer the thinnest face possible without sacrificing feel.

Helping that feel is a thick pad of steel in the center of the cavity behind the face. The added weight in this location allows for more flex on center hits while producing the kind of pleasing feel better players require.

BRIAN MACDONALD

As for the Exotics BL Proto iron, Tour Edge chief designer David Glod worked directly with Langer to refine a set the two-time Masters champion first put in play at Augusta National in 2022. That includes the use of a pair of tungsten plugs directly behind the face in the long irons to put more mass in the hitting area. The irons, which will extremely limited (about 100 sets) also feature a fair amount of offset despite being a blade-style iron—a trait Langer has log preferred.