One Year with Takomo 101 irons: Mid-Handicap Review

One year ago I swapped out my new £1200 Titleist T350s for a set of Takomo 101s – which cost less than £500. 12 months on, how do I feel about that decision, and what do I think of the clubs themselves? In this video I provide my full one-year review of the Takomo 101 irons.

*Chapters*
00:37 – Background
01:23 – Titleist T350s
05:00 – Performance
07:09 – Looks
09:05 – Durability
10:34 – Feel
11:31 – Verdict
12:44 – Handicap??

For more regular updates, follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/golflifecrisis/
————————————————————–
Is it possible to take up golf late in life and still make it on tour? I’m embarking on a mission to go from golf rookie at 40 to tour pro at 50, doing everything I can to get good enough, quickly enough to qualify for the Legends Tour.

Follow my journey as I try to understand what drives sustainable improvement in golf, how quickly that improvement can come, and if this mad endeavour is even feasible.

Welcome to my Golf Life Crisis.

one year ago as a high handicap beginner golfer I swapped out my set of 1,200 pound Titalist T350s for these the Tacomao 101 irons which cost less than £500 12 months on how do I feel about that decision and what do I think of the clubs themselves and crucially have they helped me drop my handicap in that time watch on to find out and for my full one-year review of the Tacoma 101’s so when I first started golfing uh just under two years ago now like a lot of people I moved into some loner clubs uh to get myself going that were just borrowed off a friend some old Ping irons they were sort of 15 years old uh but they were absolutely fine just while I was getting used to the game and more importantly seeing if I wanted to continue however after a couple of months I decided that I did want to continue uh and I kind of gotten pretty quickly obsessed so I went for a fitting for some irons of my own and what I ended up with was a set of Titus T 350s which at the time were the number one game improvement iron for high handicappers which is something that I very much was and they’d only been out kind of two or 3 months so I went for a fitting which was a pretty good experience first time I’ve done anything like that found it very very fun and I ended up with a full set of the T350s from 4 iron through to pitching wedge unfortunately it wasn’t long before I ran into a fairly significant issue with the T350s or at least the set that I’d been sold um after only a couple of weeks of use on the range the back panel fell off my 4 iron now these are hollowheaded iron um so they’re a forged face but they just have a plastic back panel which has kind of the Titus logo and things like that um and this just popped off during a rain session one day hadn’t done anything weird with it i hadn’t thrown it or smashed it but the plate just popped off the back and kind of exposed the cavity at the back of the iron head now full credit to Titalist and the shop that I bought the irons from um they handled the return seamlessly they sent me not just a new 4 iron but actually a full new set of T350s a range collection of my existing set and so within probably a week maybe 10 days I had once again a full functioning set of T350s and could go out and start playing again unfortunately that wasn’t the end of the story with the T350s as a couple of months later the same thing happened with my 9 iron this time I was out on the course and didn’t even realize it had fallen off until after the round but I looked down at my bag and I’d saw that once again a panel had popped off one of my clubs the back of the iron had been exposed i did reach out to the shop who reached out to Titalist and again they did do a pretty good returns process slightly more of a faf this time around i don’t know if they thought I was running some sort of iron racket and trying to just get free sets of clubs but again within a couple of weeks um I actually had to take the clubs in this time got sent a new set and had once again a full set of T350s however I was slightly soured at this point i spent obviously a lot of money on these lovely new irons and twice I’d had issues with them with the back plate popping off uh and I kind of thought at that point maybe I wanted to swap out into something else this is when I stumbled across Tacomao and ultimately ended up in a set of the Tacoma 101’s at this point in time it’s impossible to move online without seeing Tacoma everywhere tons of the big YouTube golf influencers use them from the Brian brothers we’ve got Grant Horvat now an owner of the company etc etc but back when I bought my clubs a year ago it wasn’t quite the same landscape the first thing I thought was that the irons were absolutely beautiful and obviously still maintain that today um but also the idea that you could get a full set of good performing forgiving irons as a sort of beginner golfer for such a cheap price was kind of amazing to me and because I’d been having the issues with the Titus I thought maybe I could swap it out uh and save myself a little bit of money in the process so what I decided to do was to sell my T350s uh I put them on eBay i paid about £1,200 for them um and obviously they were used but I still managed to get something like £850 for them which I thought was pretty good and I used that money to buy a full set of the Tacoma 101’s which I’m still using today now the price of these has gone up very slightly over the years since I bought mine but at the time they were £450 for a full set of irons for through pitching wedge that’s basically 40% of what I’d paid for my T350s new um and you know not much less than 60% of what I got from them secondhand so I was able to play the T350s for a few months sell them buy a brand new set of 101s and still have made a decent amount of money doing so and since then I have used the Tacoma 101’s for a full year and uh I wanted to give a kind of roundup of what I thought what I make of the irons would I recommend them generally my experiences and my reviews using the 101’s the big headline is that I absolutely love these clubs but don’t click off the video just yet cuz I will go into a little bit more detail about why what I think of them and what my experience has been like um the most important thing is obviously the performance and frankly I found almost no difference between these and the significantly more expensive set of T350s now the 101’s are designed for the higher handicap golfer on their website Tacomao says they are for anything from a brand new beginner player to a kind of 15 handicap or so and that was definitely who I was when I first got them handicap at the time of purchasing these was 19 um so performance is obviously you know primary consideration for anyone buying any kind of irons but particularly a new golfer who’s just looking to get better and needs a good amount of forgiveness like most irons they feel great when you hit them off the center of the club but they also don’t feel that bad when you hit them off the heel or the toe or catch one a bit thin uh and more importantly the performance doesn’t differ wildly like you might get with something like a blade obviously you’ll get something of a distance drop off if you’re not hitting out of the center but generally these are pretty tolerant of bad strikes um and again against the T350 I didn’t notice anything meaningful in terms of them losing distance or losing accuracy when I wasn’t hitting them perfectly the one thing I would say um the one difference I did find first to the T350s was that these don’t have the tendency to have a kind of really hot shot out of the middle of nowhere that goes kind of 10 15 yards longer that is something that I did notice with the T350s occasionally for no reason that I could ascertain the ball would just fly a green or just go 10 15 yards longer than I expected um they were kind of a very hot iron like a lot of game improvement irons are these have good distance they’re fairly strong lofted they do go quite a long way but I certainly didn’t notice those extra hot ones coming off out of the middle of nowhere and kind of going longer than my target so that has been good so overall I would say the performance of these every bit as good as clubs that cost three times as much and no complaints from me as a kind of beginner high handicap golfer so I mentioned this already but one of the things that attracted me to the Tacoma Ions in the first place is the looks now it’s hard to deny that these and in fact all of the Tacoma Ions just look brilliant they’re such a sleek minimalist design which is something that really appeals to me they’re not plastered in logos or screws or plates or anything like that they’re just a really sleek clean beautiful looking iron and I think it’s incredible to get something which is a hollow head forgiving essentially game improvement iron that still looks this good since I’ve had these in the bag I’ve had a lot of nice comments about them a lot of admiring glances and people thinking that they might in fact be blades um and sort of given me quizzical looks to ask why a player of my fairly middling standard of golf would be playing blades but of course they’re not these are a beginner’s game improvement iron but they’re just in a really really sleek appearance uh and that is something that I definitely do appreciate now obviously whether an iron performs well whether an iron is good is more important than how they look but I do think there’s something to be said for having clubs in your bag which you just really enjoy hitting it’s nice to be able to look down in your bag every time you go out for a round of golf and be happy with your set of clubs to enjoy pulling them out the bag to enjoy hitting them and while it may be just a placebo effect I think there probably is something in the fact that if you like your clubs you’re going to hit them more maybe practice more play maybe play more and then ultimately hopefully play better so massive tick in the looks department for the Tacomaos and I just really enjoy seeing them in my bag really enjoy taking them out and hitting them and that hasn’t worn off a year on so as I said the performance of these things has been great i’ve certainly noticed no difference in terms of their ability to hold greens um no difference really in the trajectory or spin rate or distances versus the T350s but there are two areas where I think they might be slightly weaker than their competitors even if it is only very fractionally the first is durability now I’ve had these irons for 12 months now um and to be fair in that time I have played quite a lot of golf but even so they have started to wear on the face fairly significantly certainly the clubs that I tend to hit more in practice like my eight iron in particular is showing a good amount of wear on the face um it is kind of tarnishing and wearing quite a lot around the sweet spot um and yes around certain other areas of the club face as well but uh that is something which I don’t have a great deal of comparison for these are obviously the first set of irons I’ve owned for any meaningful length of time when I have looked at playing partners ions and even some that they’ve had for longer than I’ve been playing these for I don’t notice quite so much wear and tear on them as I’ve seen with these in the first 12 months very quick update here because I wanted to make sure I wasn’t just imagining this i had a look at one of my friends sets of irons and compared it to my Tacoma 101’s on the left you can see the 9 iron from his set of Mizuno irons which he’s had for 8 years and on the right you can see my 8 iron from the 101’s so you can definitely see that the Tacoma 101s have tarnished much more quickly in that time than his set of Mazunos obviously I don’t know exactly how many rounds of golf he’s played in that time but over eight years it will definitely be more than I have played in 12 months i haven’t noticed any performance drop off or issues with the clubs yet but it is just interesting to note that they do seem to wear slightly more quicker than some other sets of irons potentially and the only other area where I’d say perhaps the T350s were superior was feel now these do feel great don’t get me wrong and if you hit them out of the sweet spot they feel fantastic as I said before they don’t feel truly terrible and sort of bone trembling if you catch them a little bit thin um but they just aren’t quite as buttery soft as the T350s were now the difference there is that these aren’t a forged irons whereas the T350s were and with those forged irons you’re typically going to get that slightly softer slightly smoother feel when you hit them well it’s not a complaint against these you know they’re not forged and that is partially reflected in the price and certainly some of the Tacoma Ions like the 2011’s are forged and so will feel that little bit softer but it’s just a worthwhile point of comparison when looking at what these are like against what I used to have they feel fantastic and I have no complaints they just don’t feel quite as wonderfully fantastic as the T350s did when hitting them really really well ultimately my experience with the Tacoma 101’s has been incredibly positive and I absolutely recommend them and I do not regret making the switch the fact that I was able to save so much money going from a kind of bigname premium iron to these and noticed no difference in performance is pretty incredible um I think for anyone starting out who wants their own set of irons they are kind of the perfect place to go they’re good they’re forgiving uh they look beautiful and ultimately you don’t have to spend a ton of money to get a great performing set of irons even now you can buy a full set of 101’s 43 through pitching wedge for less than £500 which is an absolutely incredible bargain um and certainly although you can’t get fitted for them which is again another potential slight downside if you are just starting out as a higher handicap golfer I don’t think there’s anything you can do better if you’re going to go out and buy something brand new then get yourself a set of Tacoma 101s for my side I’m going to stick with them for a bit longer there is a chance I will get a new fitting at some point in the next year or two when my handicap comes down further but for now I’m going to stick with them and keep playing and they have seen me through a good amount of improvement um the big question is has my handicap dropped using the Tacoma 101’s and the answer is absolutely yes i was a 19 when I first bought them and as of recording this video I am a 14.2 so five strokes knocked off my handicap in the 12 months of using the 101s now of course are they the primary reason that handicap has dropped no i’ve been playing a lot i’ve been practicing a lot and I’m sure that using the T350s or another decent set of irons I’d have been able to make just as much progress but I think it’s notable to see that you don’t have to spend a huge amount of money to get good irons that can help you as a beginner golfer go from a very high handicap to more of that mid- handicap range and so for anyone looking to do that I would say check out the Tacoma 101’s if you like the way they look and you want something that can perform well and feel good then they would get a big thumbs up from me thanks for watching this video i hope you found it useful and if you did I would love it if you consider liking and subscribing to the channel uh and if you have your own experience with the Tacoma 101’s or indeed any other irons as higher handicap or beginner golfers then do let me know in the comments below and I will see you in the next one