The Return of the Orlimar TriMetal

Orlimar’s new owners bring an old favorite storming back to life.

By Tony Dear

It’s been a couple of weeks since we featured a once-great club that virtually disappeared before being revived either by the original manufacturer or an entirely new owner. We’ve put Callaway Steelhead woods, the Hogan Edge iron, Lynx irons, and new Tommy Armour products on this page recently, and a slow-ish couple of weeks for big-brand launches allows us to return to the rebirth theme with the Orlimar TriMetal fairway wood.

A hugely successful club in the late 1990s, the TriMetal featured a stainless steel body, a steel face, and copper tungsten weights in the sole, and which allowed the distance conversation to shift away from the driver for a spell. Designed by Jesse Ortiz in San Francisco, the TriMetal saw family-owned Orlimar’s sales figures jump by over 3,000% between 1997 and 1998.

Ortiz was reluctant to diversify into other products, however, and after disputes with other, bigger manufacturers, Orlimar more or less folded before being sold to Michigan company King Par, based in the Flint suburb of Flushing.

As with some other brands, Orlimar ended up selling discount clubs and accessories at Walmart, and though King Par launched the positively-reviewed Orlimar Driv-Brid hybrid in 2014, it wasn’t enough to revive its flagging business. In 2016, King Par sold Orlimar to component company Hireko Golf, founded in Japan in the early 1980s and with a US base in City of Industry, CA.

The man responsible for the relaunch of the TriMetal was Hireko’s Technical Director Jeff Summitt who says recreating the club was no big deal really “because the original was such a well-designed, iconic club.”

Summitt deepened the low-profile face slightly, and instead of the original’s copper/tungsten inlays, he inserted a 10g tungsten screw into the sole toward the rear positioning the Center of Gravity low and toward the back of the club enabling average golfers to get the ball airborne easily. “And we selected the popular UST Recoil technology shaft as the stock offering,” Summitt adds.

The other metals in the clubhead, besides the tungsten, are high-strength S450 stainless steel which forms the body and ultra-thin (just 2mm in places), variable-thickness face, and 17-4 stainless steel in the sole.

Joining the TriMetal fairway wood in the new Orlimar line-up are the V18 driver ($400) which features a rotating soleplate with a tungsten weight that can be set in one of eight different positions to produce the desired ball-flight, and TriMetal hybrids ($150).

TriMetal fairway wood – $150. Available in right-hand only, 3-wood (15°) and 5-wood (19°).
orlimar.com
hirekogolf.com