Gear: Cleveland CBX Full-Face 2 wedges
Price: $169.99 each with True Temper Dynamic Gold 115 Spinner Tour Issue steel shafts and Lamkin Crossline 360 grips.
Specs: Cast stainless steel with face-roughening treatment and vibration-absorbing gel backpiece. Even lofts 50 degrees to 60 degrees
Available: Feb. 3
Who It’s For: Golfers who want more forgiveness than traditional wedges without sacrificing spin.
The Skinny: The CBX Full-Face 2 has the largest face of any Cleveland wedge, and combined with perimeter weighting, tour-level grooves, surface-roughening treatments and a water-repellant treatment, it blends forgiveness and control.
The Deep Dive: Most golfers don’t consider wedges to be the kind of clubs where you will find a lot of technology. Drivers have moveable weights, irons often have exotic materials and putters can be milled and shaped into wild creations, while wedges have looked roughly the same for decades. The Cleveland CBX Full-Face 2 wedges, however, have a lot of technologies designed into them to make them more playable and forgiving while also helping golfers get better, more-consistent results around the greens.
The CBX Full-Face 2 wedges have a high-toe design and the largest hitting area of any Cleveland wedge. It’s 13 percent larger than the RTX Full-Face, and unlike that wedge, the CBX Full-Face 2 has perimeter weighting.
Instead of being made entirely from stainless steel, the heel area and hosel of the CBX Full-Face 2 have a vibration-damping material Cleveland calls ZipCore that is less dense. That shifts more weight toward the toe side and, along with the added mass high in the toe area, pulls the center of gravity more to the middle of the hitting zone.
To help golfers create more spin on chips, pitches and approach shots, Cleveland designers gave the CBX Full-Face 2 wedges UltiZip grooves. They are sharper, deeper and packed more closely together than the ZipGrooves in Cleveland’s CBX Full Face wedge, which allowed designers to add two more grooves to the hitting area.
To help golfers maintain spin on shots hit from wet turf and rough, Cleveland gave the CBX Full-Face 2 wedges HydraZip, a laser-milling pattern added between the main grooves. The design is more open in the 50- and 52-degree models to make those clubs behave more like extensions of a golfer’s irons, and the HydraZip pattern is denser in the 54-, 56-, 58- and 60-degree wedges to allow for more spin on shots hit around the greens.
Cleveland added a vibration-dampening thermoplastic polyurethane insert to the back of each club to enhance the feel.
Finally, the CBX Full-Face 2 has been made with loft-specific sole designs. The 50- and 52-degree wedges have full soles with extra bounce behind the leading edge, so the club works through the turf and maintains speed on approach shots. The 54- to 60-degree wedges have a C-shaped sole design with material removed from the heel and toe areas, so golfers can open the face and add loft while still getting the leading edge under the ball.
