Orlimar forged blades, any good?

[OzricBish]

Just purchased a ( rather inexpensive) set of 3 - SW   Orlimar forged blades and wondered if anyone had any experience of them.   I'm looking to use them as an intro to using blades and I'm wondering if they will give me a true feel of playing bladed clubs. Any advice /info greatly appreciated .

[Hacker James]

I can not speak to the Olimar Blades, but I really love the two Olimar Maraged Tri-metals I have. One 15* and one 21*. Very low profile, gets the ball up in a hurry, but off the tee box you really need to tee them low. In deep rough, you will more than likely get under the ball. I picked them up in a thrift store for around $5 and I will snag them up anytime I happen to run across them.

[Mr. Desmond]

They should be fine - an old set like that was probably designed by Jesse Ortiz' dad.

[Panchobuddy123]

These irons are the real deal!  Better than much today and in fact  VEGA uses the same tooling.  Jesse Ortiz is a friend of mine and when i was a kid, I would golf with his dad Lou.  They made the finest persimmon head clubs ever with players like Seve, Arnold and Johnny Miller having these in their bags. back then, players were not paid to play equipment etc.  They made great putters, too. Still have a orlimar GYRO that I won in a junior tournament.

I have played these irons for 28 years. I am a scratch golfer and have not been able to find anything better.  If you are looking for something "NEW" with this head design, try VEGA or KZG. But you will pay $$$$.  Get the lies lofts checked and changed, put in some DG S300 shafts and you favorite grips.....you will never go back!

Here is the background that Jesse gave me a few years ago.

FROM JESSE ORTIZ:

Here is the real story:

The irons were designed by my dad in the late ‘70s….around 1978- 79. The cost of making the tooling and forged dies was prohibitive for our small company, so Bob Morse, the agent for the Mori Trading Company, suggested he could find another small company that would order the same heads with a slightly different grind, thus getting us to the minimum order required to get a deep discount on the tooling.

Bob Morse was a semi-retired exec with Union Hardware….the company had Dr Braly on staff and eventually became Precision Shafts which made the Rifle line and FM Precision shafts; bringing frequency matched shafts to golf. Bob was originally an exec with True Temper. He was doing work on the side to stay busy in the Industry. The Mori Trading Company was a sub-agent of a very old forged house in Japan that only made very high quality forgings for Japanese manufacturers. We were the first US company to have product from them.

The other small company that Bob put us with was a start-up called Taylor Made Golf. They had just come out with their metal woods, which we all thought were a novelty. They had no problem sharing the design because they were in the wood business. That changed quickly in a couple of years and they started telling people that we had stolen their design and were going to sue us. It was all BS because my dad designed the damn irons and we agreed to share the cost of tooling!

It got to the point that Taylor took credit for the irons and we no longer cared since we moved over to cavity backed heads. Eventually, both Taylor and Orlimar stopped making the forgings because costs from Japan got high and demand for forgings waned. The foundry that made the original heads closed up, and Mori Trading fell on hard times. Today, the tooling is held by one of Mori’s old partners, Fumi Tankano, who is having the heads produced at another factory in Japan as an open stock model, and KZG is having some made. I do not know if they feel the same as our old ones since I don’t know the material they are using. The steel Mori used was very soft and solid feeling. I think the thin top half of the blade and the very pronounced muscle my dad designed also helped in the feel of the club. It was really the first of the exaggerated sole weighted forged irons. Up until then, all the forged blades had thinner soles and higher CGs, so mis-hits were pretty harsh feeling.

My dad loved the feel of forgings but knew they were hard to hit for average golfers. Creating this low CG forging was his answer to a game improvement club….long before the term ‘game improvement’ was coined.

I hope this helps answer your questions. Thanks for your interest.

Best Regards, Jesse

[OzricBish]

Wow !!

Thanks for your reply, its  the best  I could have wished for !!  I really appreciate it..... I could sort of tell these had good history by the look and feel.

They do feel really good, but you're right about the lies,  and the grips are thinner than those I'm used to.  I guess I got a bargain for £29.99 ( about 48 bucks)..... Just need to get the set up right.

Thanks again for giving me the background and advice on a great  set of irons.

[pkincy]

I have two sets of the forged blades.  The first set I ordered from Lou in 1986 with Dynamic Gold X100 shafts in half inch extra length.  I used them until the mid 90's when I had to reshaft them to S300s.   The X100's were like swinging tree trunks.  I still have that set.   1-SW.   I used to carry a driver and the irons and that was my set.   About 10 years ago I found another set of 2-pw for $40 in the used club bin at a Golf Mart store.   So I bought them.   I also have a 1, 3 and 4 persimmon Orlimar set.  Once/year I take them out just to remember how hard it was to hit these clubs.  Hit them perfect and it was like butter but the sweet spot is smaller than a dime.