60" CUES

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BLACKHEARTCUES

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I've been making Qs since 1986, but I have never been happy with the balance of my Qs, when asked to make a 60" Q. For this extra length Q, do you add thickness to the joint area for strength?...JER
 
BLACKHEARTCUES said:
I've been making Qs since 1986, but I have never been happy with the balance of my Qs, when asked to make a 60" Q. For this extra length Q, do you add thickness to the joint area for strength?...JER
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That is an interesting puzzle. To not have a fat butt, the taper needs to be different. The slighter taper would naturally throw the balance more forward. There should be a trade-off that allows the balance to be where you want it, with out the cue getting to heavy. Thanks for the puzzle, it is an interesting one. ;)

Tracy
 
I have both 59" and 60" cues,,,none of the 60" cues feel as good as the 59 inchers,, they are all the same (normal) joint size,,, one drawback of the 60" cues is there is no adjusting the weight down (the natural weight of the wood is around 19+ oz.)..they all shoot good,,,the 59 inchers just shoot better !
 
JoeyInCali said:
I've shot with 60" Zylr. It still hit a ton.
It's .850 at the joint and 1.250" at the bottom.
Having a compound taper helps. The handle doesn't get too fat and heavy.
Single taper, dual taper can be argued all day but I know several very good makers prefer dual taper. Of course several makers prefer single taper as well.
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My normal joint is .830 & I go up to .845 for these longer Qs. My butt size is 1.270, which I maintain reguardless of the length...JER
 
BLACKHEARTCUES said:
I've been making Qs since 1986, but I have never been happy with the balance of my Qs, when asked to make a 60" Q. For this extra length Q, do you add thickness to the joint area for strength?...JER
Click to expand...

My friend has a 58" and a 60" from the same cue maker. The joints on his cues are the same size. The weight on the cues are close( around 20 0z.) but the longer cue has a thinner taper and is made of a lighter wood. The 58" cue has ebony as it's primary wood.
 
Jer,

The cue that i am playing with now, is just a hair under 60". I perfer a larger joint size, so that might have helped.
It might help to play around with not so much the diameters, but the lengths of the different sections of the butt (forearm/handle/sleeve.)
 
I have a 60" cue, my current playing cue and the joint size I have is .850, same as the 58" that I have. Still balanced the same way but the taper varies slightly and hardly noticeable.

With your joint size, having a 60" cue would appear to be thinner than a 58". Having a slightly bigger joint size could do the trick... that is if we're thinking of ratio and proportion wise.

Hadj
 
I built the 60" I play with, and I aggree with Jack, It's a good shooting cue once you get use to it, but It's not the same as a shorter one that you can pick right up, and really open your stroke up on. It forces you to learn the cue, but plays pretty consistent once you do. I only have a single taper with .830 joint on mine, so that the wrap did'nt feel like the end of a baseball bat, and vibrations or negative feedback are'nt really an issue like I thought they may be, as much as just the pure weight of the cue. In fact It hits very solid, but I had to learn to ajust My stroke to accomadate for the weight and massively abrupt hit. Mine does'nt quite have that lead sled feel to it, but somewhere close in between a lighterweight whipper snapper, and the leadsled:p . One nice thing about the cue, Is that ocasionally, when I notice I'm moving My back arm around or something, but have a hard time making the ajustment, I can just let My back arm slide back farther on the handle, and it straightens the problem right out, until I can gradually start moving It back forward and into My comfort area again. It also forced me to play a more disaplined stlye, but I feel like that was a good thing in My case.:) The balance is a tricky one, but I like forward balance anyway, and just learned to deal with It. I think with the shaft that has the phenolic insert, that the middle balance point is right around the front of the wrap, so could be better. I can add weight to the back, but feel that's a give and take with this cue, so seem to be happy where it's at for now. I'd probably change that If I made another one like it though, and try to get some weight in the handle to help out.

Greg C.
 
The first and only cue I've made is for myself and it's 60" long, 18.7 oz. made from leopardwood with curly maple floating points...it's .850 at the joint and 1.310 at the buttsleeve....balance point is 20" from the bottom....
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I've had a 59" and a 60" done by the same cuemaker but a year apart. The 59" had his usual .850 joint and I didn't notice that the 60" was any different until I tried to interchange the shafts and found that he made the 60" a tad smaller at .840 but with a longer pin - about .5 cm longer(the pin did not have any threads at the bottom 5mm but flat and act as a sort of pilot). I thought it was a pretty smart way to keep the weight and balance point the same and yet get some stabillity/stiffness at the joint.
 
Talk with Paul Allers

Paul Allers has been building 59-60" cues consistently for quite awhile....I don't own one but, I can tell you that the $$$Hustlers$$$ up here in the NorthWest love the way Paul's cues play! ;)

I'm not sure how to get ahold of Paul....maybe Lisa could lend you a hand in this regard (ridewiththewind here on AZ) :D

It's my understanding that if you are over 6'1" tall that this size cue may be good choice :)
 
Talk with Paul Allers

Paul Allers has been building 59-60" cues consistently for quite awhile....I don't own one but, I can tell you that the $$$Hustlers$$$ up here in the NorthWest love the way Paul's cues play! ;)

I'm not sure how to get ahold of Paul....maybe Lisa could lend you a hand in this regard (ridewiththewind here on AZ) :D

It's my understanding that if you are over 6'1" tall that this size cue may be a good choice :)
 
One of the only other players around here who shoot with a 60" cue showed me something very interesting. The butt tapered as usual up to about 4 inches from the butt cap, and then began to reverse taper. so it started to get thinner at the last few inches of the butt, helping offset the weight issue and not really affecting the grip/feel of the cue. It's the best balanced cue I've felt to date, he just called it a "reverse" tapered butt. But it plays great.
 
I am very tall and have ape arms, and I play with a 60"+ cue that I made and love it. I didn't use any super heavy woods, and used slightly less taper than on shorter cues. The joint and butt are standard thicknesses, just a little further appart. I didn't have any problems with weight or balance on mine at all. I made a 60" cue for my wife (she is also well over 6') that did end up heavy initialy, but that was only because it was made of purpleheart and ebony. She has small hands for her height, and likes lighter cues, so the solution was to taper from a standard joint size to a smaller than normal butt. She shoots with a predator shaft, and when I ordered her shaft, I asked the rep to weigh all of the shafts and picked out the lightest one to use on her cue. It is surprisingly well balanced with only a 0.5oz weight bolt placed right against the bumper.
 
I have made several 60 inchers for players here. The first couple I noticed were a little whippy.

My cues are normally tapered straight from .845 to 1.245. For the 60 inch cues, I now taper them straight from .855 to 1.245. This adds .01 to the joint size. My shaft taper on those cues also continues that size of .855 for the first 2 inches of the shaft. I change nothing else on a 60 inch cue. Everything else is as usual.

For me, this produces a very solid, not whippy, good hitting 60 inch cue.

Hope this helps.

JWP
 
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