Like'm or not, league players are what usually pay the bills at a pool hall. They also buy more cues, mostly custom, and they are book and gadget freaks.
They buy snacks, beer and drinks, and enough cigarettes to warm the pool room with the heater off.
They, as a group, are loud and inconsiderate of people playing around them even if they know enough to get out of each others way when somebody is trying to shoot.
I realize that all league players aren't like this. Like lawyers it is the 99% that give the one percent a bad name! Until and unless things change these people are the life blood not so much of pool but of pool halls. No halls kinda takes the fun out of playing pool. Back to playing on the grass I guess.
We can try to politely educate these people, meantime we need to appreciate their buying power. By the end of their first league season most of these people have more gear than I have purchased lifetime, well over fifty years.
Seems to me most of these league people buy three playing cues before they settle down. Some are custom, some are higher end production cues. Few are cues like we buy for kids to bang around on our home tables.
The first cue is like their friend or spouse's. The second cue has some consideration of playability but probably more show than go. The third cue will play like they want it to although it might still be a bit on the flashy side.
There are a lot of things the cue builder considers that the customer rarely does. Having fought with the issue of incompatible expansion rates and a boss like a typical green cue buyer in another life, if a customer wants silver and stone side by side they are talking to the wrong builder. A lot of other things rarely considered.
A serious cue builder is building for today and for twenty or thirty years down the road, maybe longer. That is a tall order with the materials and the equipment being used by most.
Even after buying the best of everything the cue builder has no control of how the cue is treated once the cue leaves his hands.
I had everything ready to build cues years ago. I had a river of wood that had been in my hands for eight years minimum. Some of it over a hundred years old. I didn't trust my adhesives or my wood after a couple of named storms hit. I could have bummed wood from builders I trusted but I wanted wood under my control for a minimum of two years before building with it.
Did you let Schmelke know about that cue falling apart so he'd have the chance to make it right? From what I've read, people have good experiences with having issues resolved when they get something less than they were expecting.
My cue shop was up and running. When I saw what they had done it wasn't possible to repair that shaft properly with that vastly oversized insert hole.
As I said, the crappy insert install was because of two deliberate build choices. Not accidental, and they sent the shaft out like that. Had I done something like that I would have trashed the shaft. I had no reason to think they wouldn't do just as bad again since it was a deliberate decision, not a material issue or even a mistake.
I wanted to see how they built a cue at that price point, I figured I found out. I had about two gross of shaft blanks on hand. I could build my own shaft cheaper and with less hassle than shipping the bad shaft back and forth.
Hu
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