And it also why I quit playing with an LD shaft entirely and went back to Natural Maple.
I want my squirt to be predictable, not so finite it's hard to measure it.
I play with 2 shafts and really light butt that is nothing but a piece of wood with a 3/8 x 10 pin in it.
Plays better than anything I've ever played with. Total weight 15.66 ounces. My cue ball is on a string
and much better than when I played with 19 or 18 ounce cues. Everyone should give this a go and
see for themselves. The cloth we play on today is fine and cue ball rolls forever. No reason not to go lighter.
After I got my TS cue, it immediately dawned on me I should have switched to lighter cues long ago.
My first custom cue I ordered was a Runde Schon in 1984. It is a gorgeous cue but it weighs a ton.
The cue butt has a large diameter butt like most cues at that time and weighs 20.35 ozs. It plays
great, or so I believed for two decades until I played with a lighter weight, flat ivory radial pin TS cue.
I was instantly sold within 15 mins and it was the reason all the cues in my case have similar specs.
My cue case is a 6x12 and all the cues within are flat faced ivory big pin designs weighing 18.5 ozs.
The cue butts & shafts are the same diameter and similar weights (14.5 oz. butts and 4 oz cue shafts).
OMG, after playing with a piloted steel joint Schon cue that was nearly 2 ozs. heavier than any of the
cues in my case, it was like I discovered how to play a musical instrument I had previously struggled
learning & mastering. All of a sudden my cue turned into making melodic sounds & I was playing music.
I squandered so many years trying to play better when all along, I was playing with a cue I loved but was
heavier than necessary. After finding my sweet spot for pool cue specs, it became the standard for me.
If I were to order another cue built, it would absolutely have the same specs as the cues in my 6x12 case.
There’s been probably 60-70 players that have tried my Scruggs. I have a waiting list of friends that want to
buy it and price was never an issue. I can make a very handsome profit if I decided to sell it. But I couldn’t
part with it except through my estate. It otherwise seems like such a rare cue that I could never replace it.
Not a single person that’s tried my Scruggs hasn’t fallen immediately in love with the way it played for them.
Why? It is a flat faced ivory Scruggs radial pin custom cue weighing 18.4 ozs.; my other cues are 18.5 ozs.
And another revelation happened for me 2 years ago. I started playing with Kielwood shafts. Wow…..so much
better than original maple shafts as as long as you can duplicate the weight of the original maple shafts. For
me it became a challenge to find cue makers that could build a KW shaft that wasn’t cored, didn’t have any
weight added via inserts and was just solid wood and had to be 3.8 to 4.2 ozs. with a targeted weight of 4 ozs.
It took me months to find the right cue makers after being told by several what I wanted built couldn’t be done.
Well, there are 4 KW shafts in my cue case that proved some cue makers are lazy or aren’t as talented as some
think. After matching a KW shaft with my TS cue, it now plays like a Stradivarius where before it was just a fiddle.
The reality is there’s a weight proportionality between both halves of a 2 piece cue. Find out what works best for you.
