pooldogue said:
Maybe you havent tried the Whitten cases..... Not to say the Instroke isnt a good "style" for protection but i dont think i would let a car run over my Instroke but i would let it drive over My Whitten and without damage............
Most tube cases made with individual tubing use PVC plumbing tubes. The way the tubes are put together and the padding around and in them make s them more or less protective of the cues inside.
Whitten's construction results in a solid unit that is very strong and distributes impact well. Where it falters a little bit in my opinion is that there is no padding inside the tubes to protect the cues from oscillation impact, nor is there any padding between the tubing and the exterior material to cushion the tubes themselves from impact.
You could drive a car over either style and probably have the cues come out unscathed. Instroke owners have many stories of just such occurences. Whitten owners are probably more careful with their cases. ;-)
However there are certain situations where the padded interior style that I developed is clearly supoerior to those cases which do not have this feature.
One is accidental removal or cues falling out of a case. This was the impetus for my start in casemaking as I had it happen to me that my case was knocked off a table and the cues fell out of it and one of them was broken. With the Instroke style the padding and the lid design to an extent helps to keep the cues in the case even when the case is turned upside down. This to me is the most important feature of the design.
Two is the oscillation impact I spoke of above. When studying why cue cases do what they do I noticed that when a case hits the ground or is severely impacted, the cue will bounce against the sidewalls inside the case. What happens is that the butt end remains relatively stationary and joint hits the side of the case repeatedly. I wondered if this could negatively impact the A joint where the handle and forearm of the cue are joined. So I tested it to see what kind of impact it would take to break or crack the A-joint. Basically a few times of dropping the case from a six foot height was all it took in an unpadded tube case. So that experiment to me was another justification to put padding inside of the tubes.
It has been my personal quest these last seventeen years to develop cases that balanced protection and function with some kind of decent look to them. To that end I have done quite a bit of study and dissection of other brands of cases to understand exactly what happens to a cue when it's inside a case. It is my opinion that some cases do little more than hold a cue and may actually harm it by the nature of the construction.
Anyway, Whitten cases are very solid as are Instrokes and JB Cases. Owners of all three brands can feel secure about the protectiveness of their cases, with the slight differences I spoke of above.
