Gear: LA Golf Blade putter Price: $1,500 with graphite shaft and Winn Jumbo Lite DRI TAC grip Specs: Milled carbon composite head with milled 303 stainless steel face insert and adjustable tungsten sole weights. 33″ to 36″
Who it’s For: Deep-pocketed golfers who want extreme forgiveness and stability on the greens with a more consistent roll.
The Skinny: Designing the head using carbon composite allowed LA Golf to make a massive heel-toe weighted blade putter with extreme perimeter weighting for increased stability and forgiveness.
The Deep Dive: For the past few years, LA Golf (LAGP) has been making a name for itself by making high-performance graphite shafts for Bryson DeChambeau, Dustin Johnson and a growing number of tour players. Many of them not only use those shafts in their woods but also in their putters because the ultra-stiff graphite shafts can help reduce twisting on off-center hits.
LAGP recently purchased SIK (Study In Kinematics) and now has released its first tip-to-grip club offering, a blade-style putter that blends LAGP’s expertise with carbon materials with one of SIK’s key technologies.
The LA Golf Blade is significantly larger than traditional blade putters. (David Dusek/Golfweek)
The first thing that every golfer will notice when he or she puts a LAGP putter down behind a golf ball is that it has a massive blade length. There is a cutout in the back flange designed that helps to bracket the ball and a single black alignment line, but the face dwarfs the ball. At the same time, it feels much lighter in your hands than you might expect. Something this large should be heavy, right?
To pull off that trick, LAGP designed the head using 435 layers of carbon composite and then milling it into shape. Typically, putters are milled from some type of stainless steel, carbon composite is significantly lighter, so the putter can be made larger and still have the same swingweight at the same length.
Some of the saved weight has been shifted to the bottom of the club in the form of metal injection molded tungsten weight screws in the heel and toe. The standard weights are 70 grams each, but 90-gram weights are available too. Putting this much weight on the perimeter of the head (which is already big) greatly enlarges the sweet spot and increases the head’s resistance to twisting on mis-hit putts, so they roll straighter and nearly as far as well-struck putts.
The stability of the LA Golf putter is also enhanced by the wide-diameter, low-torque graphite shaft that comes standard with the club.
The LA Golf Blade putter has a stainless steel face insert with variable loft. (David Dusek/Golfweek)
The help golfers create a more consistent roll, LAPG added SIK’s signature technology to the milled stainless steel face, Descending Loft Technology. It divides the grooved face into four areas that stretch from heel to toe, with the top quarter having 4 degrees of loft and each quarter below it decreasing in loft by 1 degree. Golfers who have a forward press will benefit from having extra loft, while players who swing up into their putts and strike the ball low in the face (which naturally adds loft) will make contact in a low-loft region. Normalizing the way the ball comes off the face should, according to SIK and LA Golf, lead to more consistency.
The LAGP Blade putter excels at helping golfers get the ball rolling on their intended line. (David Dusek/Golfweek)
At $1,500, this putter is going to be well beyond the means of most golfers (including yours truly), but LAGP made one available for me to try for this article. Here are a few thoughts after rolling putts with it for about 30 minutes.
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