“The cavity sibling of the revered AF-Tour blade: same tour DNA with a touch more offset and forgiveness for the strong player who wants a safety net. One of the finest forged players' cavities out of Japan.”
The AF-Tour CB is the cavity-back sibling of Epon's revered AF-Tour blade -- forged from a single billet of carbon steel with the same tour-shaped profile and minimal offset, but with a shallow muscle-back cavity added for stability the pure blade doesn't have. Reviewers who tested the MB and CB side by side found the CB comes out slightly ahead on stability and forgiveness -- switching from the blade to the cavity 'feels almost automatic' -- while the blade retains a slight edge in feel responsiveness and the two trade blows on distance. It's the choice for a strong player who wants tour-blade shaping and Endo's forged feel with a small safety net rather than none at all.
The AF-Tour line (blade and CB together) has generated a genuine independent following: dedicated head-to-head video and written reviews (golfclubtesthitting.com's MB-vs-CB comparison, Club Champion's video feature, GolfWRX's brand-level feature 'The Precision That Is Epon'), and it's the flagship players' iron of a brand its own US distributor says cultivates 'a cult following' comparable to Miura and Fourteen. Two-plus independent sources clear the cult-claim bar, anchored specifically at the AF-Tour tier rather than the Epon catalog broadly.
Accomplished ball-strikers and low handicaps who want the AF-Tour's tour-proven shaping and single-billet forged feel with a little more margin for error than the blade. A mid-to-high handicapper wanting forgiveness should look toward Epon's own AF-701/702/703 cavities instead -- this is a step down in forgiveness from all of them, by design.
Launched in 2015 as the cavity-back half of Epon's flagship AF-Tour pairing, positioned against other Japanese tour-blade/cavity pairs of the era (Miura's MB/CB models, Mizuno's MP-series) rather than mass-market irons -- a category where Epon's own promotional material explicitly invokes Miura as its peer set.
A shallow muscle-back cavity gives it a real, documented edge in stability over the pure AF-Tour blade sitting beside it in Epon's line, but it is still a compact-profile, minimal-offset tour iron built for a skilled ball-striker -- reviewers call the CB an easier, more automatic-feeling club than the blade, not a forgiving one in absolute terms. Scored like a strong players' cavity: kinder than a blade, nowhere near a game-improvement iron.
Calibrated across the whole catalog — a tour blade scores low here on purpose; it means control, not ease.
Complete sets with tour-weight steel shafts typically run $600-$1,000 used in 2026 -- a smaller discount off the roughly $1,700 original retail than most Epon irons see, reflecting the AF-Tour name's stronger resale demand within the JDM boutique community, consistent with its cult classic standing.
Reading is one thing — hitting is another. Book a bay and see the numbers for yourself before you buy anywhere.
