Master Pre Flag chalk.

HereWeGo: Do you mean "no comparison" as in, "the difference is night and day" between them? Or no comparison like "no difference"?

Personally I think that's the best use of Pre-flag chalk I've ever heard of. If I had a choice between "maybe the chalk sticks a little better" or 100 bucks in my pocket, I'll take the hundo and just sell it all.
 
Hope this will help. Since I switched to BD. on my home table After a few days of play I have very little blue chalk on my bridge hand. I have tried the same test with Pre-flagged an flagged masters. My hand an cue shaft have a lot of blue dust. Point being to me the BD. stays on the tip a lot better. I know this had been beat to death but this is my experience with chalk. I read hear that some people only use it when the play for money that should tell you something. But after all of this if you fell you must have pre-flagged masters an it makes you have more confidence by all means go for it. Pool has so much to do with little things we do a need to hopefully give us just that little edge. :wink:
 
Skip: Not a really scientific test. That chalk gets on your hand because it's grinding out of the chalk cube and falling directly onto your palm. It isn't going on the tip and then falling right back off the tip. Also the tip is pointing up into the air, most of the chalk that's not sticking will just sit loose on it until the stick gets tilted sideways again.

Maybe the chalk is sticking really well to the blue diamond cube :) As in, it never gets off the cube and onto your stick in the first place. Which isn't necessarily good.

Not knocking blue diamond, I hear it's good. But then I heard silver cup was good too and I hated it.

All of which has nothing to do with pre-flag vs. post-flag master chalk. I'd like to see some real proof of this. I'm inclined to think it's superstition. Maybe someday I'll get a hold of some 90's pre-flag and 60's pre-flag to test it out. Better would be someone from Tweeten explaining exactly what has and hasn't happened. Supposedly a rep claimed the formula hasn't changed for 80+ years. Has anyone found the original quote and which rep said it?
 
I thought I would post this just a a follow up. My father works for the state health department and was able to aquire a copy of the article published in Pediatrics that I had linked to earlier. It does show that Master green, Pioneer green, and Pioneer tangerine all contained levels well above 6000 ppm. It says that Crayons containing 800 ppm were rejected for sale in the US by the Consumer Product Safety Commision, just to give you an idea of how high that is. Two other colors of Master chalk were tested, red and blue, and both were below 20 ppm. Seven brands of blue chalk were tested and they were all good, but Blue Diamond was not on the list. Probably because it was not available in 1995 when the article was written.

All in all it was not that interesting of an article. It was only 2 pages and talked about the cases a little and the testing methods and gave a list of which chalks they tested and what the levels were.

I guess that if you have little ones around your pool table at home you should probably keep all of you chalk out of their reach, but be especially careful if you are using green or tangerine chalk.

(Who uses tangerine chalk anyway? Is that even a color? I thought it was fruit. It must have been an 80's thing. :grin:)

I guess all this shows that if Tweeten did indeed change the formula in chalk between pre and post flag, it was not due to removing lead except maybe in the case of green chalk.
 
Many have said that the formula for the chalk is the same for all colors, except the color of the dye, which makes manufacturing sense. If the green had too much lead and had to have the formula changed, the formula was probably changed for all the colors, except the dye. If not, there would be a seperate formula for just one or two colors of green and that wouldn't make manufacturing sense. So this seems to show that the formula was changed due to lead contamination, and is now different.
:thumbup:
 
Free Chalk?

Over the w/end I watched a fair amount of the CSI 10ball. After two particular matches- a player (after losing) made another trip to the table to pick up a piece of chalk.

Strickland/Bustamante.

Souvenir? Their own personal chalk? Some good sh#t?

Re Strickland-during the match he seemed pretty focused on keeping track of his cube of chalk.

Just curious-don't these big tournaments provide new chalk for each match?
 
I'm trying to remember, was it strickland vs. kuo po-cheng? Maybe that's the match you're thinking of? After the match earl was mad, and as he was walking away from the table he swiped a chalk. A lot of the chatroom people kind of chuckled at it cuz it had that pissy attitude like... "screw you, and I'm talking my chalk home with me too."

I assume it was his personal chalk. No idea what brand it was.
 
Hope this will help. Since I switched to BD. on my home table After a few days of play I have very little blue chalk on my bridge hand. I have tried the same test with Pre-flagged an flagged masters. My hand an cue shaft have a lot of blue dust. Point being to me the BD. stays on the tip a lot better. I know this had been beat to death but this is my experience with chalk. I read hear that some people only use it when the play for money that should tell you something. But after all of this if you fell you must have pre-flagged masters an it makes you have more confidence by all means go for it. Pool has so much to do with little things we do a need to hopefully give us just that little edge. :wink:


Not picking on you, but I've heard this story way too many times.
In short, the problem is entirely due to the way you are chalking
your tip.

I can explain how - if you want to know.

Dale
 
Many have said that the formula for the chalk is the same for all colors, except the color of the dye, which makes manufacturing sense. If the green had too much lead and had to have the formula changed, the formula was probably changed for all the colors, except the dye. If not, there would be a seperate formula for just one or two colors of green and that wouldn't make manufacturing sense. So this seems to show that the formula was changed due to lead contamination, and is now different.
:thumbup:

The article did state that lead was used in some coloring agents. I am guessing that some lead compound was used to make the green chalk green. If that is the case then they would have only had to change the coloring compound for the colors that contained lead, not the formula for all colors.

As for why there is a perceived difference between pre and post flag chalk, I can think another possibility. That is that they might have changed vendors for an ingredient. I found out that billiard chalk is ~95% silicon dioxide. A different vendor using a different refining process might produce a slightly different end result without any changes being made to the formula itself. In fact that would make some sense and coincide with the flag being printed on post 9/11 chalk. During the (comparatively) small recession starting in 2001 many companies were trying to reduce costs by negotiating deals with their vendors. The company I work for went through this last year and ended up saving a lot of money. Maybe they got a better deal through another vendor for an ingredient used in all the chalk they make so the change happened at roughly the same time as the decision to print the flag on the label after 9/11. That is all pure speculation on my part, but is does make sense.

As for why I have put some much thought into this, I don't have a clue. Sometimes I just find the oddest stuff to become totally interested in. I should get out more.:wink:
 
The vendor theory makes sense to me. If the ingredients remain the same, the refining process could produce more or less grittiness I imagine. It could also be that while the ingredients didn't change, the proportion of the mix did.
 
The article did state that lead was used in some coloring agents. I am guessing that some lead compound was used to make the green chalk green. If that is the case then they would have only had to change the coloring compound for the colors that contained lead, not the formula for all colors.

As for why there is a perceived difference between pre and post flag chalk, I can think another possibility. That is that they might have changed vendors for an ingredient. I found out that billiard chalk is ~95% silicon dioxide. A different vendor using a different refining process might produce a slightly different end result without any changes being made to the formula itself. In fact that would make some sense and coincide with the flag being printed on post 9/11 chalk. During the (comparatively) small recession starting in 2001 many companies were trying to reduce costs by negotiating deals with their vendors. The company I work for went through this last year and ended up saving a lot of money. Maybe they got a better deal through another vendor for an ingredient used in all the chalk they make so the change happened at roughly the same time as the decision to print the flag on the label after 9/11. That is all pure speculation on my part, but is does make sense.

As for why I have put some much thought into this, I don't have a clue. Sometimes I just find the oddest stuff to become totally interested in. I should get out more.:wink:

I think this is a great explanation and probably the best guess of what happened if there is a difference. I could try to re-state but would come up with only something similar to what jridpath said.
 
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