Tungsten in Club Design

Tungsten is a very dense metallic element that club designers use to strategically place significant amounts of weight into areas of very small volume. Marni Ines, Titleist Director of Iron Development said, " For us as engineers, tungsten is a cool material to use because it allows us to manipulate important performance factors. By placing tungsten in the heel and the toe of an iron, we can increase Moment of Inertia (MOI). Depending on how low or deep we distribute tungsten within the clubhead, we can also shift the club's Center of Gravity (CG)."

Moment of Inertia measures a club’s resistance to rotation, which directly affects its stability at impact. "The more stable the club is at impact," Marni explained, "the less the clubhead twists at impact on off-center hits. When there's less twisting, more energy gets returned to the golf ball and the closer you get to the distance you experience on pure shots. High MOI also results in tighter dispersion patterns, so your shots are more consistent".

Center of Gravity is the point within a golf club where mass is evenly distributed in all directions. CG location directly influences launch, spin, and overall performance. "Different iron lofts within a set will have different amounts of tungsten used in their designs," Marni said, "and the placement location of the tungsten will vary from iron to iron. Golfers typically struggle with their long irons, so we place tungsten lower in those 3-, 4- and even 5-iron lofts to lower the center of gravity, which helps to get the launch up where they need it on those clubs."

Titleist iron models include the T100, T150, T200 and T350, all of which utilize high-grade tungsten to provide golfers with a wide range of performance options.

"At Titleist we only use high density tungsten alloys," Marni shared. "Up to 18 grams/cubic centimeter, which is pretty close to absolutely pure. The tungsten that we use gives us greater design freedom. For the same volume of material, high density tungsten allows us to move the center of gravity farther than less pure grades of tungsten." 

Fun Fact: The symbol for Tungsten on the periodic table of elements is "W", which is derived from its German name, Wolfram. Wolfram comes from wolframite, which was one of the ores in which tungsten was most often found. The name Tungsten is Swedish and translates into English as “heavy stone.”