By Mike Stachura
Odds are your wedge lofts – everything from your sand wedge to your pitching wedge – are messed up. But it’s not your fault. Manufacturers have been strengthening the lofts on irons for decades and while there are merits and demerits to this practice, it does mean that golfers need to pay a little more attention to how the short irons and wedges are spaced within your set. Proper spacing will produce meaningful yardage gaps between clubs and making those distances consistent is going to yield more short shots that finish closer to the hole. Here are some hard and fast rules to help you mind the gaps.

1. Count how many clubs you want in your bag up to and including the 9-iron. Starting with your putter, if the number of clubs you’re carrying up to your 9-iron is 11, then you only have room for three wedges. If it’s 10, then you have room for four wedges. In our experience, if you only have three clubs to carry you past your 40-degree 9-iron, you’re going to be playing a lot of in-between and half shots in the scoring zone when you should be making full swings. Finding a way to make space in your bag for one extra wedge is going to give you the ability to have more specific clubs for certain shots. Instead of trying to hit a shot with a 3/4 swing, you’ll be able to take a full swing.

2. Know your pitching wedge loft. If it’s 45 degrees or less, add three more wedges that are spaced apart by no more than 4-5 degrees each. So generally think about putting in a gap wedge that’s 48 or 50 degrees, a sand wedge that’s between 54 and 56 degrees, and a lob wedge that’s between 58 and 60 degrees. These are general guidelines, make sure you’re working with your fitter to get the gapping that works best for you.

3. You must have a wedge between your pitching wedge loft and your sand wedge loft. The gap wedge (usually around 50 degrees) provides a vital yardage between those two clubs. Our recommendation is that you endeavor to match the gap wedge to the short irons and pitching wedge in your set because this gap wedge will also likely be a full-swing club. Your sand wedge and lob wedge will be used more around the green than in full swings.

4. Remember wedges can easily be bent a degree or two, strong or weak, to achieve the desired loft spacing. That means a 50-degree wedge can easily be a 51- or 49-degree club, But be aware that as you start strengthening or weakening the lofts of your high-lofted wedges, you’re also affecting the bounce angle. Every degree strong reduces bounce by a degree, and vice versa.

5. Ultra-high lofted wedges may help the ball get in the air quicker, but we think a maximum loft of 58 degrees provides the best versatility for your highest-lofted wedge and a more solid contact for optimized greenside spin. An ideal progression is for the pitching wedge to be 45 degrees, followed by a 50-degree gap wedge and complemented by 54- and 58-degree sand and lob wedges.

Related: How to hit wedges tight from any distance

6. As always, get with your fitter to gain a better understanding of how your irons and wedges should work together. In fact, if you’re being fit for irons, it’s an excellent idea to add on a wedge fitting to properly fill out the rest of your bag. You can find a qualified fitter here.

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“Choosing wedges used to be largely down to player preference but it’s become far more of a science nowadays thanks to the variety of lofts, bounces, grinds, heads and finishes available.

Cleveland Golf’s new RXT-3 range is a just unveiled case in point. It’s worth looking at the new technology introduced by the Californian company as we weight up which wedges are right for your game.

Firstly, new “Feel Balancing Technology” shifts the center of gravity (COG) to the center of the face by redistributing weight shaved from the hosel. This improves shot dispersion and feel through stability at impact and less vibration.

The distinctive new V-shaped sole grinds have more leading edge bounce, ensuring the club moves faster through the turf at impact. Testing shows the V-grind loses 29% of speed through the turf compared to 52% from more traditionally shaped soles. Because amateurs don’t always make solid contact and rarely deliver the club the same way repeatedly, this dramatically helps distance control.

Finally, the RXT-3s new Rotex face has deeper and narrower U shaped grooves. Added with a new micro milling pattern which increases friction, this creates more spin from a variety of lies.

So how can those advances benefit you? Determining the right loft gaps is a vital step in getting the right wedges to match your game with the starting point being the loft of your pitching wedge (traditionally 45 degrees). From there you can select lofts to cover a variety of yardages. I like to keep a four-degree gap between my wedges which equates to a 10-12-yard gap between full shots.

Selecting the right grind and bounce is where things can get more personal. Cleveland has three V-Shaped sole grinds to match certain impact positions and this is where a custom fitter comes in. It’s not as simple as categorising players as having shallow or steep angles of attack because you can be steep but de-loft the club, using more of the front of the sole. Conversely, I see players who are steep but use the back of the sole. With professional guidance and tools such as the Cleveland wedge analyser, it takes away the guess work.

When you get the right grind and bounce, the consistency of strike will improve dramatically as well as your distance control. The opposite applies when you pitch up to the course with an ill-considered grind and bounce combo.

Cleveland has produced the RTX-3 with blade and cavity back heads. Again, personal preference plays a role here but I’m a firm believer that performance outweighs preference.

The cavity back offers a slightly bigger and more forgiving head while the blade offers a sleek look and increased workability. The key is trying the different options with one of our expert custom fitters to make sure you make the right choice.  Your handicap will thank you.” — with Kent Gray

Jason Ashley is Senior Custom Fit Specialist at egolfmegastore.ae

The post VIDEO: Cleveland Golf’s new <br> RXT-3 range shows why you <br> need new wedges now appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

TaylorMade’s Milled Grind wedges offer a fitting idea for the clubs charged with the most precise distance control in the bag: Precision manufacturing techniques.

As TaylorMade’s engineering team sees it, a wedge design’s precision can be compromised by a crude manufacturing process that often involves old-fashioned hand-grinding techniques. So instead the Milled Grind wedges, which originally are cast from soft 8620 steel, use a computer milling process on every wedge to precisely shape the contours andbounce angles of the sole. This process numerically matches the computer design model’s parameters explicitly. The process is also designed to produce a more consistent leading edge shape from wedge to wedge for more reliable versatility than hand grinding mass production of wedges.

“People think that if it’s hand-crafted it’s got be better, but it’s simply not,” says TaylorMade’s Paul Demkowski, a manager of product development at TaylorMade. “It’s actually a detriment. You have a line of 10-15 operators hand-polishing wedges all trying to make them identical to each other? It’s simply not possible. There’s just too much variation in that hand-polishing process.

“The sole is the business end of the wedge that we had to make sure was perfect. With the milled grind technology that we use now it’s perfect every time. It replicates our models perfectly.”

That precision also includes a rethinking of the clubhead’s center of gravity. The design saves more than 11 grams of weight by drilling a deeper bore in the hosel for the shaft and then filling a port in the heel with a soft, light polymer. The result is a center of gravity that’s now closer to the center of the face and a little higher for higher spin and launch.

The final effort to increase precision in the Milled Grind wedges is a new groove design that features steeper sidewalls and closer spacing. The steeper sidewalls help reduce launch angle and increase spin compared to previous TaylorMade wedges, while the closer spacing allows room for one extra groove for better contact with the ball.

The three Milled Grind bounce angles include the LB, a low-bounce option with a C-shaped sole grind; the MB, a mid-bounce with extra heel relief; and the HB, the higher bounce with a wider cambered sole. Altogether the Milled Grind wedges are available in 13 lofts from 50 to 60 degrees. They will be available in March (RRP US$160).

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