Nice pics!!!! Realistic colors, which is tough for me to catch but i'm not much of a photographer. I always loved that cue & it's siblings. The story behind that wood is kinda amusing & seeing these cues reminds me of that adventure.
My dad found that burl while deer hunting in Sugartree forest, hence the name of my cues LOL. He saw it on an adjacent ridge top, approx 300yds+ away and estimated it to be about the size of a basketball, and probably on a maple. He told my brother & me what area & I knew the woods well so it wasn't difficult finding it. We went to investigate, thinking we could walk in with a chainsaw & carry the burl out. Wrong. I seen it from nearly 1/4 mile away & realized it was far underestimated. The thing was growing on a pignut hickory & was approx. the size of an ATV! Worse yet, it was on a steep slope that led into a deep ravine. We cut it, anyway, and watched in utter disbelief as it tumbled/fell down the hill, tearing through a hard maple tree that was roughly 1' diameter, finally meeting it's end in the creek at the bottom.....so we thought.
By the time we made our way to it, it had begun rolling down the creek as if it was a train on tracks. We chased it several hundred feet to a spring hole where it had rested, stuck deep. Knowing we were helpless to get it any further, we decided there were two options. We could pry it out with long pry sticks & get a group of buddies & a case of beer to wrangle it on out of the woods, or else we could quarter it up right there & carry it out in pieces. We chose to drink:thumbup: We came back with some hillbilly help, beer, and a Honda 4-trax equipped with a heavy chain. Admittedly, after a few brewskies, we had a tough time differentiating the moss covered burl from any other large boulder in the creek bed. But we managed to find it by the path of devastation it left behind it. A few more brews & a lot of cursing in that ever recognizable hillbilly accent, we manged to use four guys & an ATV to get it out to a clearing where the truck was parked.
Getting it into the bed of the truck was next. Not too bad, though. We backed up to an embankment & simply rolled the behemoth chunk of wood in. Hauled it 20 miles to an Amish mill where they had a large crane to heft the burl out & onto the mill bed. Was the first time an Amish dude laughed at me in my face

He thought we brought a giant rock to be milled, & thought it was hilarious that we actually got it loaded into a pickup truck. A closer look at our "rock" & his expression quickly changed from poking fun at us to wanting to purchase the burl. I agreed to give him a slab or two for his son's furniture business & he agreed to slab the burl. He called the next day & was excited for me to come get the wood. He nor I had ever seen anything like it before. Certainly nothing that comes along often. He wasn't laughing at me anymore, but still laughed at my hillbilly logging mules (AKA drunk friends). And that's pretty much the story behind the hickory burl. The moral of the story is you can bribe hillbillies with beer to get them to do almost anything....and they never feel dumb for doing it. In fact, they enjoy themselves. I can poke fun at them, well, because i am one :grin:
So thank you for showing the pics. Brings back some fond memories & reminds me some reasons I love building cues. Who'd have ever seen that growth on a tree in the woods & thought, "pool cue"? Cool stuff.