TheThaiger
Banned
People pay $100 for a chinese made cue?
:lol:
People pay $10,000 for an American made cue?
:grin:
People pay $100 for a chinese made cue?
:lol:
Phenolic absolutely is plastic.
I to can choose to buy chinese or any other foreign product but i choose my american brothers and sisters. I chose hawaii over the caribbean . Sorry i believe in a living wage. We fight all over the world for what ever reasons but cant fight for an american job?
People pay $10,000 for an American made cue?
:grin:
Ah but had you got familiar playing with a proper snooker cue you'd be eating them words now.
The typical pool cue....Laminated maple chopsticks attatched to a butt inlaid with bits of coloured plastic by robots wrapped in an irish womans knickers. The whole lot then covered with layer upon layer of thick varnish.
No wonder the pool played wear poncy whacko jacko gloves and use bucketfulls of talc.
First, 'phenolic' only refers to the resin. The cloth or paper is what makes it a composite (a plastic composite).
Being poured is nowhere in the definition of plastic.
http://www.plasticsindustry.org/AboutPlastics/content.cfm?ItemNumber=656&navItemNumber=1128
dld
I'm not arrogant...I just think I'm better than you
The writing is on the wall.
Generally you can tell a chinese made cue by the generous amount of detail, which is usually just stickers that many people can't tell the difference with, as well as the low price,,,,,,so easily descernable from a mile away. Then there is the all exotic 'ebonized' finish, which to the more informed means cheap ass wood painted black. But at least they make cheap cues, and for the most part sell them cheap. And make no mistake, the ones I see are made extremely cheap. I get them in my repair shop occasionally,,,,,I see hollow ferulles with hardly any tenon in them at all, with plastic so cheap it melts down before I can even break the glue bond,,,,I've removed crooked pins from them that were nothing but a piece of 5/16-18 all thread hack-sawed off and the end that was screwed into the forearm not even deburred before being epoxied in. I have also seen forearms that were not cored at all,,,,,just one piece with a painted finish or a lithograph image on it to cover up the crap wood. Many times the repair work costs more than the cue could ever possibly be worth. I'll stick with American made personally,,,,,,I always get quality, and I never lose money on them.
The Fury cue thread really drove this home. "Oh it's just a cheap Chinese product". It's time we start to understand and admit, low price due to economic reasons does not automatically equal "cheap" product. How can a pool cue retailing for $100 be any good? How indeed! It can because $100 there isn't $100 here. Made from cheap materials? What exactly does that mean? Isn't all plastic pretty cheap? Custom cues are full of it. Oh wait, they call it "phenolic". China has modern equipment, cheap labor, good materials and no morals about copying what works from whomever invented it. And they are quite good at it.
China is now dominating the production cue market as they are most other consumer products but many of us Westerners are in complete denial. And it's tilting more and more that way every day. The $100 Chinese cue may or may not be equal to the $1000 domestic one today, but give it a couple more years. The writing is on the wall.
As far as the work ethic in China goes, this is an eye opener. The press was recently covering an "audit" of Apple's manufacturing supplier in China. They found that there were many workers putting in 60 hours a week. The media reported this as an abuse. However, when questioned, 48 percent of the workers said their hours on the assembly line were "reasonable," while 33.8 percent said they wanted to work more hours!
Chinese cues were junk. Even the Chinese didn't want them. But so were Janapese products, and Korean - not any more. I just saw some new Predator cues made in China. Let's put it this way, I agree that what we are going to see in the next few years is eye opening to say the least.
I don't trust products made in China. Just 5 years ago, you may recall that the Chinese were manufacturing for export toothpaste and other cosmetics that were laced with diethylene glycol – a solvent used in antifreeze.
The Chinese regulatory, environmental and safety standards are just not up to the standards found in the U.S. and Europe.
Ah! "Wity" is back!
Welcome to the Main forum, Wity!
-Sean
I to can choose to buy Chinese or any other foreign product but i choose my American brothers and sisters. I chose Hawaii over the Caribbean . Sorry i believe in a living wage. We fight all over the world for what ever reasons but cant fight for an American job?
This is sadly very true. In the last 5 years I have read numerous articles about this very thing. And last year I experienced it first hand.
I was at a discount store to buy an extension cord. There was one for 25 bucks and one that looked the same and was the same length for 10.99. I bought the cheaper one because I couldn't reason why the other should cost more. Well, I found out when i got home. I plugged it into a box fan in my garage while I was working in it to get a breeze going. After about 2 hours the cord started smoking, when I went to unplug it I burnt my hand a little from the cord.
The rating on the cord was sufficient to handle the current that the motor required, so I couldn't understand why it got hot. I did some checking and found out that these extension cords were made in China and they faked the UL logo and used light gauge wiring. So I cut the sheathing off to look at the wire, sure enough, what should have been 14 gauge copper wire looked more like 18 gauge aluminum! It couldn't handle the current and burnt up.
There are several stories like these from lead based paints being used to other harmful chemicals and cutting corners that can lead to dangerous outcomes and China has been the manufacturer in all of these cases. Other countries do it to, including the good ole USA, BUT the reason for allot of the distrust is a constant flood of inferior and often dangerous product coming from China.