Your first pictures made me a little skeptical to be honest. The slightly different angle and the red arrow cutting off part of the top of the cue seemed like someone trying to enhance their position a little. These pictures do a much better job supporting your position.
A couple possibilities, one is that the black ring was a soft plastic that didn't tolerate heat. I'm sure you know that properly pressed linen gets pretty hot and has a lot of pressure put on it. The other possibility is that the linen was substantially thinner than the original leather after pressing and they deliberately took down the black ring to better match the diameter of the linen. Of course it is also possible that somebody did a quick butcher job to get a job out fast that was already very late.
It seems like valid complaints on this cue so the comments below don't apply so much to this cue as to all cues sent off for work, particularly old cues. I remember one that was refinished and horror of horrors, a point or two got sharpied in! That thread heated up to warp speed! Then we took a good look at the "before" pictures at the same high magnification. The "old master" had sharpied in a wiped point to begin with. The old refinisher put back what he found.
The large screens and magnification of digital imaging give many of us the same view as looking through a microscope. Playing with a camera and lenses I had years ago I took a high resolution image of a roughly three-sixteenths inch smooth chrome circular dome, the primer in a bullet. When I blew it up to the size of a dinner plate it was full of dents, dings, pits, and scratches! Looking at one of the most valuable cues in the world, the silver ginacue, at these same magnifications reveals a host of flaws. That cue has had several hundred thousand offered for it and is rumored to have had half a million offered for it quite some time ago.
Perfect to even a fine craftsman's naked eye isn't the same as perfect under high magnification. The funny thing is that the fine craftsmanship and tiny flaws of handmade cues is the reason for buying custom cues. If I had an order for 250 cues at $10,000 apiece I could turn out 250 of the most perfect cues ever built. While short run, these would be production cues with machines and modern quality control devices and techniques applied to the creation of these cues. 25 or 50 years from now a person would be lucky to get their purchase price back, not considering the shrinking value of the dollar.
When we look at perfection in an inlay we are often looking at an illusion. One piece fit perfectly to the other is tricky, particularly when the two pieces will shrink differently with time. If one of those pieces happens to have been put in as a liquid the fit is much better! Many other tricks of the trade to make less than perfect appear perfect but the simple truth is that part of being a master is knowing how to solve problems large and small so that the customer never sees them.
There was a time many considered me a master at auto body repair, even the courts accepted me as an expert in the field. Out of hundreds of jobs I turned out one that was perfect, repairing a dent not much bigger than the end of my thumb. A tough job, I did it three times and painted it twice. A new truck with 84 miles on it, nothing less than perfect was acceptable. I didn't point out that the factory component on the other side of the truck wasn't perfect. Many here don't notice imperfections until after they have work done and get a cue back. Some of the imperfections may be the fault of the repairmen or refinisher, some of the imperfections were there all the time and were not in the scope of work to be performed.
I hope if nothing else threads like this encourage everyone to take good quality pictures of cues before sending them off for work.
Hu
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that's a possibility! It's summer time please get outside and get fresh air guys . He will let us know what happens!
