Comparing different 6 irons & building a Longdrive Iron

Who hasn't experienced it: standing on the tee of a par 3 and wanting to know which iron the other players are using. Funnily enough, even among good players there is a widespread belief that a 7-iron is also a 7-iron. However, with this test we would like to show how clear the differences can be and why it may not be a good idea to rely on them.

Our Blade Iron

First of all, we play a Miura 101 Blade with very classic lofts of 30° in the 6 iron, all with a Project X 6.0 shaft in 37.5". Pretty much the exact club of our tester. This would be the standard iron with which we see a club head speed of 92mph, a ball speed of 120mph and 162m carry. Please don't be impressed by the dispersion in the graph, this is not accurate with the Blade.

Our Players Iron

We switch to a so-called Players iron with an identical shaft but slightly more "modern" lofts of 27°. The iron is a hollow construction in a rather compact head. It is designed to be more forgiving and easier to launch. It also produces more ball speed than a blade. This is exactly what we see in our test. We gain 12m of carry with this head and the 3° less loft and reach 174m.

Our Longdrive Iron

It's time to build a game improvement iron designed for maximum ball speed, minimum spin, maximum launch and minimum loft. This iron has only 23° and is still a 6 iron. We equip it with a 38" 100g Accra carbon shaft. This is relatively stiff for its weight class and with the longer shaft we achieve greater leverage.

The results are impressive: 96.6mph club head speed, 138mph ball speed, 3500rpm spin and a carry length of almost 200m - almost 40m more than with the Blade.

Conclusion

This test shows one thing above all: a 6 iron is not the same as a 6 iron. The differences can be enormous. A 40m difference in length is no joke and our "longdrive iron" would almost be a hybrid for our player - at least in terms of the values. It therefore makes little sense to compare apples and oranges and no golfer should be impressed by differences between "identical" irons.