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Gear: Ping G430 LST 3-wood
Price: $600 with PING Alta CB Black, Mitsubishi Kai’Li White or Project X HZRDUS Smoke Red RDX shaft and Golf Pride 360 Tour Velvet grips
Specs: 169-cc volume with adjustable hosel, titanium face and chassis, carbon fiber crown and tungsten sole plate. 15-degrees only.
Who It’s For: Golfers who want a low-spin, distance-oriented 3-wood that is loaded with the latest technology.
The Skinny: Ping has taken the technologies used in the G430 LST driver and added extra weight to the bottom of its new low-spin 3-wood to create a club that fast-swinging golfers can use as a driver alternative off the tee and a powerful club to attack long par 5s from the fairway.
The Deep Dive: While the Ping G430 family was released in North America back in January, the G430 LST 3-wood was quietly made available to PGA Tour pros separately this spring, and it is the most technologically advanced fairway wood the Phoenix, Arizona-based company has ever created.
Most fairway woods are designed with stainless steel, because it is strong, but over the last few seasons, some brands have tinkered with multilateral designs that are typically associated with drivers. The G430 LST 3-wood fits into that category.
Like Ping’s G430 LST driver, the G430 LST 3-wood, which is only available in a 15-degree version, has a carbon fiber crown that wraps into the sides of the club to reduce weight on the top of the head. It saves about 5.5 grams of weight compared to a stainless steel crown of the same size.
The G430 LST 3-wood also features a 2041 Beta Titanium face and a Ti 8-1-1 body. Titanium, which is usually reserved for drivers, is significantly lighter than stainless steel, which is often used in fairway woods, and it can flex more efficiently at the moment of impact, to help golfers generate more ball speed and distance.
That saved weight has been concentrated in the bottom of the club in the form of an 80-gram tungsten sole weight. It pulls the center of gravity location down and back to encourage higher-flying shots with less spin.
An adjustable hosel allows players and fitters to increase or decrease the loft by up to 1.5 degrees, so this 3-wood can have as little as 13.5 degrees of loft or as much as 16.5 degrees.