Has the quality difference between "custom" and "production" become negligible?

JoeyInCali said:
Never mind the other subjects. I'm not going to argue them .
What Ray told you became fruitless.
You should have done your own prototype.
THEN YOU would have found out if he made sense or not.
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I'm not the type that needs to question everything. And I was done looking for the perfect cue years ago. They're wooden sticks. Once I stopped obsessing about which perfect tip to use, why my cue had to be a custom, and why "hit" was so important, my game improved. Straight, weight, and tip. After that, I'll get used to whatever I play with.

I'll leave the quest for knowledge to you. As Bill said, he sees a lack of innovation these days, as well. Maybe you'll be the next Bill Stroud. I'm completely happy in my ignorance that you keep pointing out :)
 
When Dan and I started Joss Cues the first thing we did was to measure a Balabuska shaft from my own cue. I liked the way it felt.

Later I was given a copy of Kershenbrocks' book where he laid out in excruciating detail the taper for his shafts.

It was a series of very short straight lines.

The end result was a stiffer taper with more squirt that suited many players of his day. That was before Simmonis cloth.

No one in their right mind would really want to play with that taper on Todays' cloth. Too many corrections.

Conditions have changed.

Just to clarify CNC. It is always a series of very small straight lines that emulate a curve based on the tolerance requested. The higher the tolerance the shorter the lines.

To answer the other question, I would be happy to help anyone with their cue making if I could.

Bill S.
 
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JoeyInCali said:
And my Nissan drives like a BMW.
If I got a nickel every time someone said " hits like a SW " , I'd be rich.

Sorry, that page won't open.
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It's a Zeus cue. The owner has a SW and says he measured them both.

The owner of the Zeus brand is one of the most prolific sellers of SouthWest cues on Earth.

He controls every tiny detail about those cues.

He also is part owner of Zen cues. Azen, who makes Zen cues, learned his craft by making new shafts for SouthWest cues for ten years.

None of which means that their shafts use the SW taper. But I am pretty sure if they want to they can.
 
ChicagoRJ said:
Hu, a couple of questions. How "perfect" does a cue need to be to make a ball in the pocket exactly?

Also, when was the last time you took apart a Predator, OB, Lucasi, Schon, Shmelke production cue?

And when a "custom maker" puts the parts together, surely, not all customs do it to a perfect zero tolerance fit and finish. Just like production cues that are not perfect, clearly that are LOTS of customs cue makers that are far from it.

I got an OB sneaky pete that can make any shot someone with a $50K Black Boar can make. Of course, I'd rather have the Black Boar and put on an OB shaft ;)

I mean, Black Boar makes playable works of arts. One of the best looking cues of all time was made my Black Boar imho, but she ain't gonna win me even one more single game at the end of the day.

Baseball players have to use a piece of wood to hit a baseball traveling upwards of 100 mph. Yet, they care about one thing.. wood type, handle thickness, barrel size, and weight. And everyone has a different preference for their hitting style. On the high end, it might cost $150 for a wood baseball bat, on the low end $20.

Yet, in pool, we need the most perfect, "balls dead accurate" instrument to sink a ball (that is not moving) from 5 feet away. I mean, unless you are opening me up to take out my gall bladder with that cue, I'm not too worried about 1/1000th of an inch.

I guess I look at the various watches. They all keep time very well, the cheap ones almost every bit as the "gold standard" watches that costs thousands of dollars. But folks really are not paying $10K for a watch to be an extra second more accurate than a $20 watch, are they ?

Yes, they like that it's precision built to the highest tolerance, and they like the looks, and they like the collectible factor, but I've yet to see someone brag that his watch keeps so much better time than the cheap production watches ;)

And yes, I own both production and custom cues.
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I have known some ball players. Weight, flex, neck diameter, balance, and a host of other things makes a bat hit perfectly for a player. An example of how far they will go to get everything right, I used to talk to a pro pitcher that had a full machine shop for tuning his bats. No small thing to get a bat that loads and releases properly for an individual player. Many a hot hitting streak has ended with a broken bat.

To the subject at hand, pocketing the object ball is usually the easiest part of the shot. Once that is realized, a shaft and entire cue that moves a cue ball around easily and gives a nuanced feedback becomes much more important. High level competitors at most anything have the equipment tuned to them or that suits them. No reason pool should be different. If the cue results in a few percent improvement in a person's game what is that worth? To a banger maybe just a little more enjoyment and encouragement to keep playing. To a top level pro, maybe the difference between winning two or three large events a year or none.

Pretty sure it was the great billiards and snooker player Joe Davis that searched for another cue for two years after his disappeared during a train trip. He said he would retire before going through that again. He also named several world class players that either retired or never returned to form after losing their cue. Equipment can't win for you but it can lose for you.

To try to answer the OP's question, some mass production cues have caught up with some handmade cues. Mass production hasn't caught up with the masters and probably never will. You can't program feel and judgment into a machine.

It has been years since I lost my shop now, seven I think. I haven't been inside any cues since then although I have seen a couple break in the pool room and looked at them. I don't think they have changed a whole lot. The problem is the focus of a production environment. "Acceptable" is good enough and the focus is on making something faster and cheaper. An example, pins are made out of lower quality material and are several inches shorter in some of the production cues. Making a couple dozen cues a year it's silly to cut corners like that. Making dozens a day, the few pennies matter to a high production enterprise. A corner cut that won't buy a custom builder a bottle of beer may pay several salaries for an overseas manufacturer.

Hu
 
Ernie Gutierrez, one of the greatest cue makers on earth, doesn't rely on feel and judgement.

He relies on precision and consistency.

So do big factories.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-N900A using Tapatalk
 
ShootingArts said:
I have known some ball players. Weight, flex, neck diameter, balance, and a host of other things makes a bat hit perfectly for a player. An example of how far they will go to get everything right, I used to talk to a pro pitcher that had a full machine shop for tuning his bats. No small thing to get a bat that loads and releases properly for an individual player. Many a hot hitting streak has ended with a broken bat.

To the subject at hand, pocketing the object ball is usually the easiest part of the shot. Once that is realized, a shaft and entire cue that moves a cue ball around easily and gives a nuanced feedback becomes much more important. High level competitors at most anything have the equipment tuned to them or that suits them. No reason pool should be different. If the cue results in a few percent improvement in a person's game what is that worth? To a banger maybe just a little more enjoyment and encouragement to keep playing. To a top level pro, maybe the difference between winning two or three large events a year or none.

Pretty sure it was the great billiards and snooker player Joe Davis that searched for another cue for two years after his disappeared during a train trip. He said he would retire before going through that again. He also named several world class players that either retired or never returned to form after losing their cue. Equipment can't win for you but it can lose for you.

To try to answer the OP's question, some mass production cues have caught up with some handmade cues. Mass production hasn't caught up with the masters and probably never will.

Hu
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Well,in baseball they are trying to hit a ball 400 feet! So every inch matters and even then the best bat on the planet costs less then $300... For guys with $100M contracts. But even then they are getting the specs of the bat down at a production shop but a guy they never heard of. Us pool league amatuers are NOT trying to make a living. Us amateur baseball players buy bats off the shelf and hit just fine. You can't compare what a professional baseball player wants in his bat to the rest of the pool playing public. I'm never gonna hit 100mph pitches, and if I did, I just might spend the extra few bucks to saw off an ounce off my bat somewhere ;)

I've asked if anyone has a cue that can make any shot my production OB sneaky Pete can't make and nobody stood up to say theirs could.

Plus this thread was not about the true master builders, the top tier guys, it was about custom cues in general. The top guys build playable works of art. How good does a piece of wood need to be perfect to sink a ball from 5 feet away? Yet, major league players spend less then $300 to hit balls 400 and sometimes 500 feet. Even then they need to get the ball past 9 guys paid to try and stop it, a tough proposition indeed.

When my Hercek is finally done I'm not even sure I will play with at leagues.......not one reason to risk it getting nicked or scratched imho
 
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Shawn Armstrong said:
I ride a motorcycle. Used to have a CBR600RR. I could beat the Skyline off the line only. That thing would eat me past 100mph. Frightening car.
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Scary what cars can do today! They make the muscle cars of the 60's look like slow pokes. My old GTO I had could not catch many cars built today! A Honda Civic today would eat the shorts of a GTO!
 
ChicagoRJ said:
....How good does a piece of wood need to be perfect to sink a ball from 5 feet away?

When my Hercek is finally done I'm not even sure I will play with at leagues.......not one reason to risk it getting nicked or scratched imho
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I'm not always concerned about a shot 5 feet away, but how I get to the next ball from 5 feet away, after that shot. Some cues get the job done better than others. And yes, there are multiple reasons for that.

As far as the cue you mention, funny, I understand that all to well. It is easy to get something banged up in a pool hall. I have an ivory handled cue that really does play about the best of the bunch along with an ivory sleeved cue I have. Both are great. Both are pretty costly to repair too.
 
ElCorazonFrio said:
No, they would be close to comparable with the GTO still coming out on top, per the manufacturer's specs of a 2016 Civic vs 1967-1970 GTO's. When you put modern tires on the GTO, it would gain performance.
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Nope. 2016 Civic Type R goes 0-60 in 5.7 seconds. GTO makes it in 6.1 seconds. And we are comparing a Civic for heavens sake, not a Corvette, Z-28, Dodge Hellcat, Viper or even a Cadillac CTS-V.

Heck, a V6 Nissan Maxima family sedan keeps pace with a 1969 GTO. THis is meant as no disrespect towards the old cars, cause they are certainly much better looking imho. I was the proud owner of a 69 goat.

But, when folks talk about the "good old" days with muscle cars, those days are gone. The real muscle days are RIGHT now. I mean, a 707 HP Dodge Charger Hellcat for heavens sake will do 0-60 in 3.7 seconds, a full 2.5 seconds faster than a 1969 GTO.

That's like racing against a minivan ;)
 
rexactly the point I was making!

xXGEARXx said:
I'm not always concerned about a shot 5 feet away, but how I get to the next ball from 5 feet away, after that shot. Some cues get the job done better than others. And yes, there are multiple reasons for that.

. . . .
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The cue that offers the best control moving the cue ball around is the best in my opinion and that usually means the cue that moves it around the easiest, within reason! A 6mm shaft will move the cue ball around very easily, like spit on a griddle. It's about as controllable for most people too.

The right stick for me changed as my skill levels progressed. As a beginner a 20-21 ounce cue with a 14mm tip and dead shaft played best. As I got better my cues got lighter and nimbler in all respects. The less I have to muscle a cue ball around the better my results are and I like about a 12.25 natural maple shaft today on about a 15 ounce stick. The stick is 60" with the balance at 21" from the rear, pretty much identical to a typical 58" stick with the balance at 19" from the rear. Everyone that tries my stick notices it is light, nobody notices it is long.

At my peak playing nightly I used a twelve ounce 60" snooker cue to play pool with. A 9mm or 11mm shaft and perhaps one of the original milk duds from Jensen in the early eighties.

At only about twice the weight of the cue ball, the stick seemed to do none of the work and it was all muscle control. Too, this was a very low deflection cue long before low deflection was cool. When I started using it a table length shot that was almost a center ball hit on the object ball could see me missing it entirely when I loaded up with english, my calibration was way off!

Speaking of the snooker cue, I wouldn't say that it could make a shot most other cues couldn't but I could certainly play my style of cue ball control far easier with it than any conventional cue. I played all games moving the cue ball as little as possible to achieve what I needed to and this stick was perfect for pinpoint position play. trying to achieve the same touch and consistency with a 22 ounce cue would be difficult if not impossible. Add the typical very stiff shafts of today and it becomes even more difficult.

Hu
 
j_zippel said:
The GTR is terrifying.

https://youtu.be/quEtfp_74dY?t=4

There isn't a production BMW that has a chance
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Well, you took the words out of my mouth. I was gonna say it would beat every BMW made today, but I figured there would be one model that cost over $150K that was .000001 seconds faster and didn't want to take the chance they would say, "see, this one is faster" ;)
 
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