A MAXFLI BLADE IN 2026?!

So these might be the first DTC irons that feel like a true OEM alternative because after building them, testing them on the launch monitor, on the driving range, and then out on the golf course, I fully believe MaxFly might be onto something very, very special with these XC1s. So let's get into it. So this is MaxFly's forged players iron, 1025 forged carbon steel, but it's not a one piece forged head like their Revolution or their Australian blades back in the day. There is some interior tungsten weighting in the four through eight iron to help deliver optimal ball flight, CG control, forgiveness, the things you would expect out of a player's distance iron. We still have that forged head, CNC milled face grooves. So you're gonna get that player's feel and still maintaining player's loss. They're not strong jack losses or very traditional loss. Everything about these is to appeal to that good player, that single digit handicap that maybe remembers MaxFly blades from the past or looks at this and goes, man, this is gorgeous. And then they look at the price tag, only a thousand bucks for the stock set of these. That's very desirable. And you can do a lot of customization to these and keep that price tag still roughly around a thousand bucks for the set. We're gonna dive into the customization a little bit later, but spec wise, these things tick all the boxes for a forged player's iron in 2026. And that's good and dandy and fine and all, but I wanna see what kind of data, what kind of numbers can these irons produce? Are they producing shots that are on par with the other forged player's irons out there? So let's dive into some of the numbers. Data wise, I went into this session with very high expectations. I'm testing pitching wedge, seven iron, four iron. I'm gonna pull 15 solid shots with the wedge and the seven iron and 10 solid shots with the four iron because it's a little bit harder to get 15 solid ones with the four iron at the end of the session. And with the pitching wedge, really, really solid, averaging 137 in the air. Ball speed's great. Spin is really good. Launch is really good. It flew really straight, really, really straight. I mean, I'm not trying to curve it in here, but I certainly noticed how straight the ball flight was, especially on mishits, the ones that maybe didn't count for the ones that I pulled the hair or hung the face open. Flew quite straight, but it did exactly what it should do. If I pulled it, we look at one here, 142, five yards further than the average. That's what a pulled pitching wedge should do, but the spin still maintained really solid and the peak height and all of those things. And then if I hung one up and open with the face, maybe a little bit open out to the right, it flew a few yards shorter, but the spin didn't balloon. So like the tolerances of spin control with the wedge was exactly what I wanted out of a forged pitching wedge. This thing needed to do that to kind of give itself any chance of being a desirable forged set. Pitching wedge absolutely did that. Then we go into the seven iron. Kind of the same thing, just solid and straight. It's maybe a couple yards. Let's, I mean, grasping at straws. Maybe like two to two and a half yards less on average than my seven iron. But then when I look into the specs, it's one degree softer than my seven iron. And that's maybe why I noticed marginally more spin than what I want or what I get out of a seven iron and a couple yards less in the air. But that one degree of loft maybe could be the reason or it's maybe they're just slightly more spinnier heads with that tungsten weighting. But again, the tolerances were so tight and the mishits did exactly what the mishits do. The pull didn't nuke. The hang up and out of it didn't go nowhere. Like the north-south dispersion, fantastic across all quality of strike. So again, it's ticking that box. It's doing what a forged player seven iron should do. The four iron is where I began to experience maybe a little bit of the coming down to earth with these. I love the pitching wedge. I love the seven iron, but the four iron instantly I knew it was spinning too much. Granted, I don't need spin in the four and five iron, but seeing this thing spin on average 4,800 RPM, that's too much spin for me in a four iron. I wanna see a four iron spinning under 4,000 on average. And that's why I'm seeing this carry only be 208. I carry my four iron out on the golf course. I'm pulling that from 220, 10 yards less. And I know it's a degree softer than my current P7CBs, but one degree of loss is not gonna attribute to 10 yards and a thousand RPMs, maybe two yards and 200 RPMs. So it's definitely a spinnier long iron, which is gonna help a lot of players, but it also makes me wonder, okay, this set actually could work into not just the single digit handicapped bag, but that being said, the dispersion, the tolerances, just like the pitching wedge, just like the seven iron, so good. Mishits did exactly what mishits should do. Pull, didn't go crazy far. Hang it open, spin it too much. Didn't go stupid short relative to the average. And I had to suspend myself from like, oh, I wanna hit this 220. This is what it's doing. Really, really tight north-south. And that's what you want out of well-designed irons. You want the distance control to be spot on because the good player that's looking for a set of irons and looking at these, they wanna know, or you wanna know that the distance control is going to be there. And even if you slightly mishit it, you're not gonna be compromised a lot when it comes to how far it will fly on that mishit. So we've seen what they do. How do they look? How do they feel? I've hit a lot of shots at them to form this opinion. The look is great. Like this way, it just looks like an awesome blade. But then when I spin it around, it's a little bit big for my taste heel toe. And it's a bit awkward shaped looking at it like this. It seems a bit small in the heel, big to the toe. But then when I put it down behind the ball, it just fits. It looks fine. The top line is a little thicker than I would want in a blade, but I think this is about all of the blade sentiment that we get in these. Everything else is more like a cavity back, if you will. And then the feel of them is exactly that. The forgiveness of them is exactly that. I've hit a lot throughout the whole bag, hitting it high, hitting it low, mishitting it. And I'm getting pop on those mishits without it feeling like hollow, hot, ticky, tinny. The sound and feel is like a really good forged iron, not like a kind of hot player's distance iron that we see in a lot of DTC companies make. Look like a player's iron, but they're really a distance iron. The turf interaction is great. I would love a little camber on the leading edge. I like something that if I get a little steep, it comes in and out of the turf a little bit faster. But when I have done that and gotten a little bit steep, it's getting in and out of the turf just fine. But that sound and that feel isn't like a buttery muscle back Mizuno blade, the power belts that I've hit. It's not that, but it's really, really good. It doesn't seem or feel too dissimilar to my P7CBs. Same amount of forgiveness, great feel, but I can flight it. And that's what you want out of a player's iron. And I caught that a little off the toe, but I still hit the window I wanted to hit on a mishit. The forgiveness is really, really good. I'm growing to appreciate the look of them at address more than when I took them out of the box. I was like really excited this way. Then I was a little bit let down, but then the more I've hit them in this session, the more I've looked at them. It flows really nice off the ground, behind the ball and that top line to some people might be a little bit big, I don't care. And then the offset, some people say there is a good amount of offset. I don't see it, but I think offset is a bit, what I dominant are you. The offset throughout the bag looks fine to me because we know I've had some issues with DTC pitching wedge offset. I don't experience that with this. But the sound, the feel, it's everything I would want out of this player's iron from Max Fly, but there's forgiveness there. And that's gonna appeal to a lot of golfers. And I think a huge thing that will appeal to a lot of golfers that really sets these irons apart from a lot of DTC irons is the fitting and the customization process. I was able to fully build these exactly the way I wanted to with a lot of options. So we're gonna go back to the studio and I'm gonna show you my process of building these and just how great it was and how different it is than a lot of DTC stuff out there. So I've been calling these DTC irons throughout this whole video. I still believe these are DTC irons, but they have a lot of OEM sensibilities because you can buy them in store, but you can only buy them at two stores, Dick's or Golf Galaxy, where you can get fit for these. And that's what separates them from almost every other DTC option out there. There's no custom fitting option with most all DTC brands trying to sell you a set of irons for a thousand bucks or less. We've got the stock one here. Like I said, a thousand dollars. When we get to customizing it, it's really fun how much you can do with these irons. Some DTC brands will offer you three shaft options, six shaft options, maybe a grip option or two. These, you have a cornucopia of options, if you will. So I'm basically gonna build out my set right here and show you what I could have done. So if we go steel, we have three options with steel. I went KBS Tour, extra stiff, but length, I'm staying standard, but I want my lie angle one degree up. Gonna do my Z cord midsize. So if you notice there, look how many grip options we had. That's not common with DTCs. You can add your wraps, I'm standard, logo down or uninstalled, but I've built these out for me right here. They're $846.51. They're less than the stock set, which is a bit strange, but I feel like maybe that's because there is no returns on their custom builds. And I would pay no attention when you look at the specs of the custom irons. The specs change of the lofts. The lofts all say they're stronger with the custom irons, but the lofts of these heads are the same lofts of what the stock set shows, the 999 set. But if we want, I mean, we go graphite, we have eight or nine or 10, like nine graphite manufacturers, UST Mamiya, we have all of these options. And yes, this will make our set a little bit more expensive, but like, let's go KBS, TGI. It's crazy what you can do to fully make these fit you perfectly. And if you did the fitting at Dick's, if your town has a Dick's or a Golf Galaxy, you're even more ahead of the game when it comes to comparing these with a DTC set. But this experience to really like make these your own and fit to you, pretty impressive stuff. So I've tested them, I've hit them on the range, but I gotta take these to the golf course and see if this player's iron can appeal to a player out on the golf course. So let's go play some golf. So I actually got to play 27 holes with these irons. I played a nine hole scramble the day after filming where I only hit them twice and they were fine. The nine iron, I came up and out of it, it did what it should do. The four iron was about eight yards short of what our eye would hit a four iron. So it did exactly what it did in the testing. But then I got to play a full 18 holes with these things in some windy Memorial Day conditions. They did what they should do. They felt seamless into the bag. They felt like I wasn't compromising anything. If I had to hit a shot because of the wind, I was able to. And that was kind of the best way to test these things. If I had to flight it, like a little eight iron, I hit on the 17th, which was our eighth hole, awesome. I got to flight it, let the wind hit it, boom. Or a little pitching wedge where I was trying to take off 12 yards, I did. Or knocking one low under a tree, I was able to do that. And I was able to hook one about 60 yards. Yes, into the wind, off the right. I had 152, so I hooded the crap out of an eight iron and I hit it like 20 feet. That was such a fun shot. The only thing that I struggled with was stock shots. I had four stock seven irons and I basically chunked all of them. That's me, that's not the golf club. The feel, the feedback, and the forgiveness. Those chunk seven irons still, I mean, I didn't hit the green, but it stayed in front of me. I was able to get up and down for par two of the four times. But again, that's me. If I can't hit just a stock swing, that has nothing to do with the golf clubs. But the golf clubs were able to perform and deliver when I had to shape it or hit something high low. And that's super, super encouraging. If I were to keep these in the bag, I would have to work a little bit on the lofts, probably the four, five, and six iron, just to try to bring the spin down a little bit so I could get the distance that I need so that I have proper gapping as I go six, five, four into my two iron. Because if I kept it as it is and I'm hitting the four iron about 10 yards shorter than my current four iron, I would have a big gap between two iron and four iron. So that's something to take into consideration if you're considering buying these. But that fitting process, if I had went through it at Dixier Golf Galaxy, we could have worked into that. We could have maybe tried different shaft options, which could have cut a little bit of spin down for me, maybe one degree of loft, stronger. Like we could have really done some great stuff to fully make these a perfect fit into my golf bag. And that's the exciting thing about these. Yes, I'm calling them DTC, but they have so much OEM sensibility, OEM customization fitting. And the feel, the forgiveness, the play, they ticked all of those boxes. Full.