Fit For a King

Cobra’s new KING TEC family of irons features a welcome mix of form and function

By Tony Dear

In recent years, Cobra seems to have become the company creating the most far-out equipment available. Read anything describing some eccentric manufacturing process, an unexpected partnership with a non-golf company, or a product that sounds less and less conventional the further you get into the story, and there’s a good chance the subject of the article is something Cobra made.

It’s so innovative at times (it’s always had a reputation for pushing boundaries being the company that introduced oversized irons, baffler fairway woods, graphite-shafted drivers, etc.) and creates such exotic sounding/looking clubs, we often lose sight of the fact Cobra, established in Australia in 1973, bought by Acushnet in 1995, sold to Puma in 2010, and now headquartered in Carlsbad, Calif. can build a beautiful, elegant, club with the best of them.
Like its new KING TEC player’s distance iron. This very attractive club goes through an elaborate five-step forging procedure during which the 1025 carbon-steel billet is heated to extreme temperatures (upwards of 1,200˚  Celsius), pounded and shaped under a similarly astonishing amount of pressure (2,000 tons), and then cooled. Details and logos are added during the fourth step, and the metal’s grain structure becomes uniform in the fifth and final step.

Cobra’s familiar Forged PWRSHELL face insert, with AI-designed H.O.T Face Variable Thickness Geometry, is then added to ensure off-center strikes come off the clubface without losing significant speed. The new insert is thinner, yet stronger, than its predecessors which means the face flexes a little more and you get a little power boost.

To lower the clubhead’s Center of Gravity (CG) in the 4-7 irons, increase the ball’s launch angle, and make the club more stable and, therefore, forgiving, a 20g piece of tungsten is added low down. The clubs with higher lofts do not have the tungsten as you need a more controllable, penetrating trajectory with the scoring clubs.

Cobra says the KING TEC is built for scratch to 12-handicappers who would prefer the shorter, more compact blade, softened topline, and “tucked toe”. The updated PW with a flatter topline and straighter leading edge will also be a popular change.
For the higher handicapper (10-20), the KING TEC-X provides what Cobra calls “Player’s Game-Improvement” (no, we’ve not come across that term either). The aim is obviously to create a forgiving club with a high Moment of Inertia (MOI) that looks as similar as possible to a better player’s club. The KING TEC-X is slightly larger than its sibling but does, indeed, look the part thanks to a rounder/sleeker topline than on previous models and the reduced amount of offset.

As with the KING TEC, this model features the PWRSHELL H.O.T. Face with a thinner Variable Thickness Geometry face insert. Instead of the 20g tungsten weight, however, the KING TEC-X has a mighty 70g chunk which lowers the CG and raises the launch angle still further, making it much easier for slower swing speed golfers to get the ball off the ground with the longer clubs.
The TEC-X is also available in a ONE Length version where every club is built to 7-iron length. Golfers who use Arccos game-tracking software (purchase a set of Cobra clubs and you get free Arccos Smart Sensors plus a free trial of the Arccos app) have found that their Green in Regulation (GIR) stat improves on average by up to 40%.

The 4-6 irons in the ONE Length have slightly wider (by 1.5mm) soles, and the set has a little more offset and weaker lofts to help the game-improver straighten out their slice and get a little more distance. And just like the KING TEC and KING TEC-X, the ONE Length model is a hollow-bodied iron whose insides are filled with foam to dampen impact vibrations and soften the sound.

KING TEC
$1,300
Lofts – 4-21˚, 7-29.5˚, PW-44˚
Shafts – KBS $-Taper Lite
Right and left-hand (left-hand custom only)

KING TEC-X
$1,300
Lofts – 4-19˚, 7-27˚, PW-42˚
Shafts – KBS Tour Lite
Right and left-hand (left-hand custom only)

KING TEC-X ONE Length
$1,300
Lofts – 4-19.5˚, 7-27˚, PW-42˚
Shafts – KBS Tour Lite
Right and left-hand (left-hand custom only)

Pre-order at cobragolf.com now. Arrives at retail on November 8th.

Colorado AvidGolfer Magazine is the state’s leading resource for golf and the lifestyle that surrounds it, publishing eight issues annually and proudly delivering daily content via coloradoavidgolfer.com.

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