middleofnowhere
Registered
I've been looking and I can't find any. Does anybody have any of the videos of that machine that would demonstrate cue deflection? I used to see it at the BCA show and it was pretty interesting.
I think it was called Iron Willie and it might have belonged to Meucci
- Thread starter middleofnowhere
- Start date
It was Predator. Some pics and brief clips here.
I USED TO HAVE AN IRON WILLIE, I'M OLD NOW.
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Wooden shafts do lose stiffness with the passage of time...
Bob Meucci's machine was called the Myth Destroyer. I think he made it about 1996. I remember a slo-mo video he made with it.
I was at show once. I believe it was when SBE was at the Scanticon in VF. Pred had Iron willie set up and was letting guys bring over their shafts and run them thru willie to test them against their 10 piece pie shafts. I had my regular one piece shaft taper and I was also experimenting with a 4 piece lam style shaft also at the time. This was before I had even heard of the pred pie shafts.
I ran my shafts on willie and they didn't like the results.
They run the test several times and came back with the same results each time.
Kind of shooed me away after those trials
middleofnowhere
Registered
Thanks I didn't think I was crazy cuz I used to talk to Bob all the time. If I remember he had some kind of a thing set up using carbon paper that would show exactly where the ball hit and how much it deflected. They would walk around the show and get everybody's cues that would be willing to allow them to be tested and show that the meucci had less deflection.
If I remember right though Bob's theory was a little different. He had a long taper and he said that what it would do is it would flex in the center while keeping the tip more online.
and this theorizing and machine testing resulted in the meucci black dot tomato stake?
Brother Ron
Active member
This is an interesting theory, and has me wondering about why I could always get more spin on the cue ball without a miscue with my whippy 12mm Eckes shaft compared to everyone else back in the 70's & 80's.
I do realize that a 12mm tip is able to hit lower on the cue ball compared to a 13mm tip, but a tip that maintains it's position on a cue ball at impact is less likely to result in a miscue.
Flexibility is needed, along side low front end mass.
The problem with Meucci’s black dot shaft was that it was laminated and had to be held in a certain direction to get it to work, unlike the Predator pie construction that gave radial consistency
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The amount of spin you get is entirely determined by how far you hit from center - and the miscue limit is the same for all cues.
A 13mm tip can hit 13mm above the cloth (1.29mm past the miscue limit) with a level stick. With the unavoidable tilt of the stick (meaning the equator and miscue limit are tilted higher), it can hit even farther past the miscue limit. No stick can hit farther than that from center without miscuing.
That describes all sticks (if they're well chalked) that don't hit past the miscue limit (1/2 radius from center).
All this stuff has been discussed extensively here - you might want to search for it.
pj
chgo
I wonder, then, how my very stiff (conical taper) shaft gets less deflection than just about any other I've heard about.
pj
chgo
Maybe the front end is more flexible than you realize.
It’s simple physics, something needs to move to the side (deflect), either the cue ball or the shaft.
Actually, the simple physics of conservation of momentum says they must move to opposite sides equally, for all cues. The flexibility seems to have much less influence than the mass of the front of the stick. The effect of flexibility is also much harder to measure.
DeeDeeCues
Well-known member
No. This statement is wrong for so many reasons. The mass of the cueball is not the same as the effective mass of the cue, so they cannot move the same amount. The cue is also basically a spring, so it will have reactive forces after the hit. There is a lot more, but I'm not interested in going deeper.
Equal and opposite momenta to the sides.
DeeDeeCues
Well-known member
Yeah, but that isn't what you wrote. Momentum is conserved, but the amount out movement is not the same for all cues.
I have the VHS of Bob's Myth Destroyer somewhere on a shelf. It's probably on youtube now. Bob's device was not legit, because he was shooting the CB into the OB, and seeing how far off-line the OB hit the rail. Predator's Iron Willie, and all the other cue testing robots made, only shot the CB, and measured how far it squirted sideways.
Brother Ron
Active member
Do any of these devices also measure how far the tip of the shaft itself bends offline without losing contact with the cue ball and causing a miscue?
Do any of them measure how much the shaft bends while the tip maintains its position?
Tip deflection VS shaft flexing would be an interesting study when used with studying ball deflection as well as ball spin.
Anytime contact is maintained through accelerated impact more friction is created resulting in more spin being applied to the cue ball.
Just like the shaft on a golf club that flexes and then springs back resulting in greater impact on the golf ball causing greater distance -
A cue shaft that flexes in the middle and then springs back through impact creating more speed while maintaining contact will have an affect on the end result.
High speed video has shown that the springing back takes much longer than the tip-to-ball contact, so it has no significant effect on the energy transfer.