Howdy howdy howdy. Folks talk about how this cue maker or company uses crappy wood or uses good wood or uses wood excavated from the tomb of Cleopatra which is magical. Some use A grade shaft wood. Some use AA grade. Some nobody knows what they use. My question is this. How does the grade or quality of wood actually translate into the playing characteristics once made into a shaft? AA can draw the ball 20 feet but A can only draw the ball 15? lol deflection? resistance to warpage? Aesthetics? If it is dried and aged and treated properly does it matter? What are the real differences once you start hitting balls? Feel free to discuss while I go perform some menial tasks for my corporate masters.
Playing characteristics of shaft wood
- Thread starter FunChamp
- Start date
never
think of it. way overthinking things.
Good shaft wood will have straight grain and lots of growth rings which tells you it came from a slow growth maple tree. All other things being equal a shaft made from high quality wood will be more resistant to warpage. I also believe the shaft will feel stiffer if it is made from better maple as well.
The main quality of good shaft wood is how much it hits. The common rule of thumb is at least a ton (2,000 lbs) - more is better.
pj
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Not really qualified to answer, but I do know my Schon with its shaft taken down to just under 12.7, and my DZ with its shaft at 12.8 have a vastly different hit, and both shafts have the same tip on them. In fact all my Schon standard shafts have basically the same hit. Also the grain structure of my Schon shafts is different than the DZ. Is one better than the other, I don't really know as some days I like one, and other days the other. Lets just say you could call the Schon shafts Megan, and the DZ Kate, both beautiful in their own way.
Shaft quality.
So I understand the different grades of shaft woods. AAA I guess is the best. Is there a huge difference in prices from say a to aaa. Not asking for anyone to divulge their prices but is aaa like three times more than a? I understand that a $300 stick may not warrant your best shaft wood, but at...
forums.azbilliards.com
Check out this forum on shaft wood, it was posted in the ask the cuemaker forum and will give you a lot of educated answers to your question
Exactly.
I ordered a How-Good-Does-My-Shaft-Hit device from Amazon. It was $1,995, so it didn't cost a ton.
I measured my old Richard Black shafts, and they all hit a ton. But, the Museum of Fine Arts just had an Egyptian exhibit, and I was able to get some wood from Cleopatra's tomb and have a shaft made from that. I measured that, and it hits 3,000 lbs. It hits half-again as good as my Black shafts.
Those are real qualities related to the wood's stability / resistance to warpage, not quality of play. Except for density and stiffness, I don't think any other wood quality matters to playability.... there seems to always be talk about getting good shaft wood and grain pattern and blah blah.
pj
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As well as hit feel. And I'm sure the wood a shaft is made out of (even from the same tree) does affect tangible things like how much it will spin a ball at a given force, but that is pretty much voodoo, guesses and luck more than scientific analysis of say rings per inch of the tree, or moisture content, or grain distribution, etc... since wood as a whole is about as unique as fingerprints. I had a Joss cue made in the 90s, the shaft it came with was very nice, more than any other Joss I remember playing with. A lot of people wanted to buy that thing off me. Why was that shaft so special coming from a pretty much mass produced cue line? Dunno. And I bet the people who made it, before it was built, also did not know it was anything better or worse than the other 200 shafts they made that week or month. Maybe it was even myself who made it play that way with the weather it was in and how I cleaned it and changed the taper and diameter over the years of use.
Tip offset is what determines amt. of spin you get. Wood has nothing to do with that.
Yes, wood density and/or stiffness can make a small difference in how much power is transmitted for the same stroke speed - but the spin/speed ratio (what I think of as the "amount" of spin) is the same.
pj
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That sentence seems to contradict itself, if you put in more power to the cueball at the same force of hit, the shot with the more power will put on more spin on the ball. Meaning if you use say X newtons of power to the stoke, the shaft and other things like the tip, whatever, will take away n, so the final hit the cueball gets is X-n. If a shaft absorbs less force that would make n smaller, so the final force X is larger, meaning the cueball has more power going to it sending it off at a higher speed.
If you make a pendulum and put a foam block at it, take a second one and put a metal block on it with the same mass, then relace both, I would bell that a cueball at the end of the swing where the metal block is will go further because less force is lost with the deforming of the block. Shafts and tips act the exact same way. The more final energy gets to the cueball, the further it will go, if from a faster stoke or harder material with less flex, it's all the same to the final calculation of what the cueball sees.
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Tip offset is only part of that, how much force goes into the hit is half of the equation. If you shoot 1 tip to the right and hit half as hard, you will get half the spin correct? So if the shaft transfers more power to the cueball strike you will get more spin. The thing here is how much does different wood do that and is it possible to tell that just from examining the wood for specific characteristics that was the question.
This is actually the whole thing behind shafts like the Revo getting more action from the same speed hit, the shaft transfers more force to the cueball at the end of the whole physical thing starting with you moving your arm. It's all physics, the actual material and forces are what they are, and they can't do anything but what the laws of our universe tell it to do. What we are trying to do is force all this hard physics into variables like wood type and humans hitting the thing at different speeds and angles, but at the end of it all, material matters to the hit, if it's 20% or 2% depends on what we are talking about.
At the end of the day this may not mean a player won or lost a game, but from an impartial science standpoint, there will be a difference.
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I've owned many cues. I am not really educated in wood to know what I am looking at when I hold a shaft. Some of the wood looks good with the grains or color and some look like it was pulled out of a creek bed from 2 years ago. I was just wondering if it really makes any difference in the ability to play with it. Once it's dried/cured or whatever and tapered, polished. w.e. I mean we are talking about a stick with a piece of leather on the end. It can only do so much. just curious.
As you say, changing the amount of force applied changes both the CB's spin and its speed - and it's this combination of spin and speed (the spin/speed ratio) that matters in pool - not the RPMs alone, but the revolutions per distance of travel. That spin/speed ratio only changes with tip distance from centerball.
pj
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Doesn't even matter
Pretty much. I think a good tip on any straight shaft is what's important.
pj <- marketer's nightmare
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