WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW: The Mizuno M.Craft X putter lineup mixes not only materials (forged 1025 steel, similar to the steel used in the company’s popular irons, and 7075 aluminum), it also mixes the performance aspects of blades and mallets to produce designs that offer the best of both. The interchangeable collection of mallet shapes uses three neck-hosel pieces and three body designs that are joined by two heel and toe sole weight screws. The matrix yields nine different putter heads.

PRICE: $400. Three body shapes: Winged mallet, square mallet, round mallet. Three neck options: plumber’s, double bend, slant. Nine total models. Available Feb. 3.

3 Cool Things

1. Connections. While there have been plenty of putter designs that have mixed front and back parts of different materials or metals, what’s distinctive about the M.Craft X collection is how the heel and toe sole weights are the connection points. The screw weights literally hold the putter together. That allows any of three different face-neck pieces to join with any of three body shapes. The three face-neck pieces offer three different hosels: plumber’s neck, slant neck and a spud neck to accept a double-bend shaft. Those pieces are made from the company’s forged 1025 carbon steel made famous by its forged irons. They join with one of three 7075 aluminum bodies in the shapes of a squared off mallet (Four), a rounded mallet (Five) and a winged mallet (Six). It’s not merely an erector set project, says Mizuno’s John Freeman, R&D engineer.

“This putter has pretty unique mass properties with the front part being steel and the back part aluminum,” Freeman said. “That means the CG [center of gravity] depth is similar to a blade so when you’re using any of these heads it is going to feel kind of like a blade during the stroke. That combination of the materials gives us a more forgiving head where you can feel the forgiveness and the consistency in the roll, but then you’re having the feel of a blade when you’re swinging it.”

Freeman notes that with heavier weight in the front with the carbon-steel piece, the M.Craft X models feature a CG slightly forward of the similarly shaped OMOI 6, but with a moment of inertia measurement (stability on off-center hits) that’s 15-percent higher.

2. Nine lives. The combination of three different face-neck pieces and three different bodies yields nine possible heads in the M.Craft X matrix to cover not only a wide array of looks but a wide range of weights, too. But the series features each head shape at a stock weight of 365 grams by utilizing 7-, 14- and 21-gram weights for the heel-toe sole weights. So the plumber’s neck models with 7-gram sole weights will produce a 365-gram head, and so too will the slant neck with 14-gram sole weights and the double bend with 21-gram sole weights.

The nine head combinations cover a range of headweights from 337 grams to 393 grams, meaning at the heaviest weight the head could accommodate an overlength shaft at 38 inches, if desired.

Because the heavier steel in the face and neck piece wraps under the sole while the lighter aluminum rests on top, the head’s lower center of gravity produces a lower-spinning launch for better initial forward roll and less skidding.

3. Familiar milling. The M.Craft X putters follow the lineage of Mizuno’s recent M.Craft and OMOI milled putters, which were single-piece forged designs with a deep milling pattern on the face. The M.Craft X models, which use the same 1025 carbon steel up front as those past models also will feature the same deep milling pattern on the face.

This article was originally published on golfdigest.com