Titleist U500, U510 Utilities Are All About Distance and Forgiveness

To quote a famous line from Scarface, say hello to our little friends: Titleist’s U500 and U510 1-irons. The brand spanking new versions of the latest U500 series are basically utility irons by any definition and they’re designed to bring hybrid performance for better players in an iron like package. Yes, that sounds pretty interesting to say the least, especially if you consider the fact that the initial prototype was named Wide Body. The new U500 1-irons were first introduced at the Memorial Tournament, i.e. they’ve already seen Tour-action. The U510 is more player friendly compared to the U500, which is more hardcore so to speak.

The latter is also shorter heel to toe compared to the U510, a design trait that makes it more appealing to Tour pros, and it has a deeper face. However, the U510 comes with basically the same technological bells and whistles as the U500, but it has a shallower face, it’s longer heel to toe (like, doh), and comes with more offset and a wider sole. Both versions are inspired from Titleist’s super rare (as in Tour-only available) 503i, which was selling on the “grey market” for over 1,000 bucks. Which means that the new U500 and U510 are built clean and they’ll get the job done with zero hassle. Groovy, baby! Moreover, what makes the new U500 pretty unique is that they’re marketed as standalone utilities, as opposed to the previous TMB; the sad news is that they won’t be part of a larger iron set. Speaking of technological bells and whistles, the U500 are aimed at improving the already popular/cutting edge TMB driving irons, and yes, that may sound absurd. As in, can it be done?

Here’s the short story: both utilities come with a forged L-face insert built using forged high strength steel, and take a load of this: the respective insert is less than 2 millimeters thick, i.e. it’s built for ludicrous speed. The L-face comes with variable thickness in a one-piece-forged manufacturing process, and has wraps under the leading edge, which means Titleist managed to save significant amounts of weight by getting rid of welds near the face, thus being able to put more discretionary mass on the heel and toe, which resulted in increased moment of inertia, i.e. improved ball speeds, especially on strikes outside the sweet spot. Moving along with the story, the U500 utilities boast almost 100 grams of weight, high density Tungsten baby, in each had; to be more precise, we’re talking about 97 grams of mass, which is quite a lot. Basically, 43 percent of the head mass in the U500s is due to tungsten weighting, and that translates into amazing forgiveness, or so we’re told!

The internal weighting using large chunks of tungsten allowed Titleist’s R&D team to create that awesome perimeter weighting without sacrificing good looks in the process, thus creating an awesome design which will please better players. Also, the lowered CoG makes the irons more stable at ball impact, especially when it comes to off center hits, thus allowing players to produce higher launching shots which also stop quicker on the greens.