First Look: Ping G410 irons
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Gear: Ping G410 irons
Price: $135 each with Ping AWT 2.0, True Temper Dynamic Gold, Nippon Pro Modus Pro or KBS Tour steel shafts and Golf Pride Tour Velvet 360 grips; $150 each with Ping Alta CB Red graphite shafts
Specs: Cast 17-4 stainless steel heads with tungsten toe and heel weights and an aluminum and elastomer badge.
Available: Feb. 7
The Goal
Designed to play bigger than they look, the new G410 irons should appeal to players who want more distance and forgiveness while maintaining better-player's iron look.
The Skinny
The new Ping G410 irons have been built to have a foot in two different worlds, the game-enhancing realm of clubs made for accomplished golfers and the game-improvement arena filled with clubs that make up for mis-hits and deliver a distance boost.
From a blade length perspective, the cast 17-4 stainless steel irons are slightly longer than the i210 and i500 irons, but shorter than the G700 and G400. They also have less offset and a topline that should appeal to a wide range of players.
What makes the G410 irons perform, however, is the combination of a thin face, 360-degree undercut cavity and a multimaterial badge.
Like the COR-Eye faces used in many previous Ping irons, there is a ring designed behind the center of the face that surrounds a very thin center area. The back badge covers it, but the CORE-Eye design gets progressively thinner around the edge of the hitting area, and according to Ping, it helps to generate more ball speed.
The bottom of the hitting area, where the face wraps into the leading edge, is also a critical performance area. It's especially thin and at impact acts like a diving board that allows the entire hitting area to bend more efficiently.
Creating an undercut around the entire back of the head saved Ping a significant amount of weight that could be repositioned in other places.
Much of the weight was shifted to a tungsten screw in the toe and another tungsten weight inside the hosel. By putting more mass in those areas, Ping was able to boost the moment of inertia (MOI) and make it eight percent higher than the G400 iron, even though the G410 is smaller. In fact, according to Ping, the G410 is as stable on off-center hits as the max game-improvement GMax irons.
The 360-degree undercut design also helped Ping designers pull the center of gravity (CG) location down and away from the hitting area, which should result in higher-flying shots.
Finally, to enhance sound and feel, Ping gave the G410 irons a back badge that is co-molded using aluminum and elastomer that soaks up excessive vibrations created an impact.