When COBRA launched its LIMIT3D irons in June, 2024, it was a huge step forward in innovation for the company.

The company had been experimenting with 3D printing for the last decade, but finally found the right formula to manufacture irons through the 3D printing process and released LIMIT3D. It was initially supposed to be a run of 500 sets, but due to popular demand, COBRA released a second wave of the irons.

Now, COBRA is launching its 3DP Tour iron, playing off of the success of LIMIT3D and further advancing its movement into 3D printing.

“Our LIMIT3D 3D printed irons represent COBRA’s dedication to pushing performance and technology to the limits,” COBRA Golf Vice President of Product Architecture, Jose Miraflor, said at the time of the LIMIT3D release. “One of the key advantages of this new technology is the ability to fine-tune product development and repeat the production process with 100% consistency on demand in a relatively short time in comparison with traditional casting and forging methods. This is why we can offer more of the LIMIT3D irons so quickly after selling out the first limited-edition batch.”

Mike Yagley, Vice President of Innovation at COBRA, was part of the original conversations around 3D printing nearly 12 years ago. The cost was too high and the process too new to bring anything to market, but there was an aha moment where the engineers knew they could eventually create something unique.

It started by printing prototypes instead of creating a casting tool that could take months to make.

“You inject some wax in there, you turn that into a slurry covered mold that you pour steel into. That whole process takes a long time. We looked at it and said, we could print these things and get them a lot faster,” Yagley said. “So, that really condensed the time to prototype, to innovate, to research, to understand. And, the middle of all that, we’re like, the price is coming down.

“And there was a point, an inflection point you might say, we could actually sell this thing. And that was the moment when, oh, we’ve got something here.”

They debated on the forging and casting process and if 3D printing would offer benefits outside of just improving the amount of time it would take to produce the clubs. Through research, they found that they could place internal structures inside the clubhead that would support the face and save mass.

Saving mass is an engineer’s dream and they’re usually talking about saving two, three or four grams. This process would allow them to save much more than that.

“That lattice (internal structure) provides enough stiffness to make it feel really good. Now, you’ve got 100 grams to play with,” Yagley said. “So, imagine on a 275 gram head, if you’ve got 100 grams, we’re normally talking about five grams. We get super excited over a gream.

“It’s 100 flipping grams. So, now you take that and put it in the form of tungsten in the heel and toe really low and you’ve driven the center of gravity down.”

Driving the gravity down helps launch the ball higher and it helped the engineers increase the MOI to improve forgiveness.

The engineers wanted to test their new product with Tour players and Yagley wanted to do it discretely to try to get honest feedback. Because the iron looks like a blade, but has the forgiveness of a game improvement iron, he didn’t want to tell them what the club actually was prior to hitting it.

“They look at it and go, looks like a blade, and they hit about four or five. And these are really good players, right? They hit it right in the middle and they’re like, feels like a blade,” Yagley said. “I say nothing. And then they migh mis-hit one and they go, ‘Hm, I didn’t lose 25 yards. What is this thing?’”

Yagley has coined that experience as a paradoxical reaction where a Tour player hits something new, looks at him and asks what it is without him explaining much of what the club consists of.

With the release of the 3DP Tour irons, COBRA believes that 3D printing has unlocked new design possibilities, which enabled the designers to create a compact blade shape with the mass properties of a game improvement iron.

“I’m sitting here thinking, while we’re doing all this, I’m like, we can make a better one. We could make a better one potentially for that (Tour) player, or maybe that one’s perfect for them,” Yagley said. “But now, we can make better clubs for other types of players, because there’s blades through super game improvement irons and everything in between.

“So, now we have an opportunity to do all sorts of wonderful things for players.”

The 3DP Tour irons are an evolution of the LIMIT3D irons and are COBRA’s first in-line 3D printed set of irons. It also potentially opens the door for COBRA to continue to innovate with 3D printing and offer endless options for the consumer.

When asked if Yagley believed if this could lead to creating clubs specifically for individual golfers at their exact specs, he smiled and played it coy.

“You have just gone down a path that I don’t even want to talk about yet,” Yagley said. “The answer would be, yes and imagine, just imagein what we could do for a player and we’ll leave it at that for now.”