Greetings,
Until I assemble my Maltby KE4 Forged irons later, I’m enjoying some older:
1999 Cobra — King Cobra II (oversize)
When I looked them up, both Maltby Playability Factor charts give them a
MPF: 115 ?
This is obviously either some kind of mistake or the MPF method has some odd chink in its armor and the K.C. 2 OS’s is falling through the cracks so that MPF doesn’t remotely reflect player experience on these.
They’re oversized, deep cavity backs with a modest, wide extra weight along the bottom of the cavity, peaking a little behind the sweet spot but not a lot. They’re (were) almost unanimously talked up by players of most skill levels.
A hack, I find them easier to hit than its successor the King Cobra 3400 I/XH listed as a MPF of 780, which is like you merely took the King Cobra II OS and injected some foam in the said broad, sweet spot-peaked weighted area. Not 665 MPF points worth it would seem.
I haven’t learned exactly how the score is tabulated…
Is anyone interested in looking at it and telling me if there’s a real score that can be gleaned (specs below)
These are far, far easier to play and more forgiving than clubs marked hundreds of points higher.
I lean toward call them SGI’s IMHO and limited experience, but definitely at least GI’s for sure.
Maltby’s MPF book with specs says:
- Year1999
- BrandCobra
- Head Weight258
- “C” Dimension1.030
- Basic VCOG0.890
- Moment of Inertia (MOI)13.62622
- Actual RCOG0.450
- Loft26
- VCOG Adjustment-0.008
- Actual VCOG0.882
- VCOG Correction Factor-63
- MOI Correction Factor0
- Calculated Points85
- MPF115
Thanks!
Jeff
Thanks to both Britt Lindsey and MrTKopa for the thoughtful replies (forgive my delayed return). This explains a lot… I do error toward the heel (explaining why I never noticed the COG being toward it) and yet I have noticed myself topping the ball (simply blamed my swing).
I have a set of Maltby KE4 Forged irons (I bought the last set, actually) I look forward to sinking my teeth into, but I’m not rushing to shaft them, so that I make sure to put the best and most appropriate shaft on them, resisting the urge to assemble them while my swing is still evolving so rapidly and my wallet so strained. I’m forced to be on a pretty low budget as a rule, but when I lie and wait sometimes opportunities happen. These KE4 Forged I believe deserve a fair shot from me (discontinued or not). And I’m not afraid of them being “old” in 6 months or a year esp. since they’re irons and they didn’t even come out until, I think, late 2013 or something if I remember my WayBack Machine research results (hee hee, you can use it to see what they were selling and for how much, yesteryear, on days they had enough traffic to wake up the archiver and snapshot the website). They, too, had a shorter life cycle than some, but the loving reviews seem earnest, and I chalked it up to, perhaps, being lukewarm demand for a great club for reasons that don’t matter to me. Maybe most people wanting to shell out money for a forged club wanted something more elegant-looking. KE4 Forged were originally more expensive than those elegant Malty forged irons that are struck 5 times. I can’t find a crummy review of them. I got forged cavity backs on closeout! I love the design of KE4 Forged for what they are, but what do I know…
Thanks for the info. about the King Cobra II’s. Wow.
I’ll study up on MPF and golf physics in general, now further inspired — I got a couple of Mr. Maltby’s books and already appreciate them enough to imagine getting them signed, hehe.
He’s not an elitist and knows that sometime, where there’s a will, there’s a viable way — he included options over the years how to do things on a budget or in a pinch, that would be fine if you’re mechanically inclined and have common sense or “a feel for things” in the shop, but which people on the boards would claim you have no business doing or can’t be done (from safely doing something you don’t yet have special equipment for, to building wooden DIY equipment, to boiling an assembled wood’s head in a cooking bag). Yes I can carefully pull a carbon shaft with homemade resources or everyday bench items until I can get the real thing. Especially learning on cheap used equipment! He really got my respect for that. He could have just gone for the mandatory equipment sale on every single paragraph “or else never attempt!” but instead went for useful, honest, insightful literature for more people, and entrusted some of us not to be dipsticks with our hands. Of course it’s better to have professional machinery. But some of us love tinkering as much as we do the game itself whether we’re loaded or not, and don’t want to wait years up the road to put our hands to work. Every time I have a few bucks I’ll be eyeballing Golfworks anyway.
Thanks again so much.
Jeff