Gear: Cobra 3D Printed Tour irons

Price: $2,450 (4-PW), with KBS $-Tour 100 steel shafts and Lampkin Crossline grips

Specs: 3D printed 316 stainless steel with internal tungsten weight

Available: March 21

Who they're for: Golfers who want an iron that looks like a better-player’s muscleback blade but that is as forgiving and powerful as a game-improvement club.

What you should know: By 3D printing these irons, Cobra designers could reposition weight and engineer an iron that looks like it belongs in a tour player’s bag, but the 3D Printed Tour has more perimeter weighting for a game-improvement level of forgiveness and distance.

The deep dive: A year ago Cobra may have given the golf world a taste of what’s to come by releasing the first commercially available, fully 3D printed irons, the Limit3d. Even priced at $3,000 for a set, the limited-edition clubs sold out so fast that a second batch was created to meet demand.

The new 3D Printed Tour irons are the next logical step for Coba. These clubs are not limited-edition offerings or a numbered run of prototypes targeting equipment junkies. The 3D Printed Tour irons are going to be available as a stock offering and signal that Cobra is committed to what the 3D printing process can do to elevate design and enhance performance.

Historically, there are three methods of making golf clubs, including casting, which involves pouring super-hot liquid metal into molds. A club can also be forged, which requires heating rods of metal and then pressing them into shape under extremely high pressure. Finally, there is milling, a process that involves starting with a block of metal and then using a computer-controlled tool to shave off tiny pieces of material until the desired shape is created.

While each of these methods has its pros and cons, 3D printing allows designers to create clubs that no other process can produce. For the 3D Printed Tour irons, Cobra uses direct metal laser sintering, a process that layers 316 stainless steel powder in tiny layers and uses a laser to bond the material together. Pass after pass, the printer lays the powder in place until the club is finally created and is ready for polishing and use.

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From the outside, the 3D Printed Tour irons look like traditional muscleback blades, but in the heads, the 3D printer creates an extremely strong but light lattice structure. In fact, the lattice reduces weight by 33 percent while maintaining strength and rigidness in key areas to improve the sound and feel. The lattice you see on the back of the clubs mimics the internal lattice, but it’s cosmetic to keep water and debris out of the heads.

Cobra engineers repositioned the saved weight back in the head in the form of 100 grams of tungsten weight split between the heel and toe. Adding mass in those areas boosts the moment of inertia and makes the 3D Printed Tour irons more stable on mis-hits without making the heads larger.

From a shape standpoint, the 3D Printed Tour irons mimic Cobra’s popular King Tour irons with a thin topline, moderately narrow sole and a touch of offset, so they look like a better-player’s iron but play like a game-improvement club.

The standard seven-club set comes with a 4-iron through pitching wedge, but a 3-iron and gap wedge are also available. The price is still high, $2,450, but that’s $650 less than last season’s Limit3d irons, a sign as 3D printing prices go down, the viability of using the technology to create golf clubs should increase.

This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Cobra releases 3D printed Tour irons