Construction of a Broomstick Pool Cue, part 1
Last year I decided to put the mythology of the broomstick pool cue to the test, so I constructed my first broomstick pool cue, the BS 1.
To honor the construction of a low-tech cue, I considered it best to use only low-tech construction methods and cheap materials.
1. Home Depot 15/16" diameter broom handle. It was the only broom handle in the bin that didn't have a banana curve.
2. Short deck brush. The experience wouldn't be complete without a brush to thread onto the broom handle. I bought the cheapest one.
3. A 13-year-old dried out Le Pro tip.
4. Sandpaper left over from less successful woodworking projects.
5. Super Glue.
Total material cost: less than $10.
Previous cuemaking experience: absolutely zero
The look on my wife's face when she saw my work: priceless
Materials
Before sanding and tipping.
The brush doubled as a sanding block. (Thankfully my impromptu sanding block passed sniff inspection, as shown below.) The steel thing at the bottom of the image is a 15/16" pipe coupling that I borrowed from a neighbor ($0.00). After covering the internal threads of the coupling with a scrap of paper, I jammed the thing onto the business end of the broomstick. The face of the coupling provided a reference plane so that I could sand down the end of the broomstick to a flat surface more or less at a right angle to the cylindrical axis. The coupling's threads tore through the paper and left nice (artisanal) scratch marks in the wood.
The tip, attached:
The finished BS 1, complete with its small but functional brush for cleaning up the ashes of victims who self-combust after being beaten at pool by a doofus with a broomstick.
Playability
Later I might post some photos and/or videos of the BS 1 in action. For now I'll offer a few observations.
If you've wondered whether a broomstick has issues with deflection/squirt, then the answer is
oh hell yes. If you use the equations provided by Ron Shepard in his paper on squirt, you can easily calculate that the amount of squirt from a 15/16" pole of wood is roughly 1.0 metric truckloads.
http://www.sfbilliards.com/shepard_squirt.pdf
When you have a 13 mm (~ 1/2") diameter leather tip attached to the center of a 15/16" straight cylinder of wood, you can no longer see the tip if your chin is within about 6" of the cue. When you can't see the cue tip, making a ball into the far corner pocket on a 9-foot table is like stumbling into the bathroom at night without your glasses, firing away, and hoping you're aiming into the toilet and not, say, at a random spot on the rug. (But that's what that rug's there for, right?)
Closed loop bridge? Not so easy unless you're a fairly big person. I'm travel-sized with hands to match, so I was stuck using an open bridge or a rail bridge.
For most of the shooting tests I used the broomstick without the brush. Having the brush attached makes a bold statement, and the way it can smack into the edge of the table also prevents excessive follow-through.
I didn't break & run any racks with the BS 1, but in one game of 9-ball I cheesed in the nine after breaking and running a few.
And no, I did not test the BS 1 on a snooker table.
