a question to shaft sellers

desi2960

desi2960

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
i get most of my shafts from old house cues now, but in the past i bought shafts from a lot of different sellers. everyone knows who they are, so no need to use names and get a hate thread started.

my question is what the hell is this " about 10 % of what i sell you will not be good shafts " and then they say " thats just the industry standard ".

i cannot think of any other business thats has a ' 10% of my product is no good ' , i know that if every 10th diamond i sold was a cz, i would not be in business long.

what if one of these dealers in shafts went to a butcher for 10 $25 steaks and the butcher told him you will pay for all but the 10 one is going to be rotten?

just wondering ?????
 
If you want a guarantee, then the seller will have to take a great deal of time inspecting every one of them. That would drive the price too high to be realistic and even then the guarantee would be unrealistic. Wood is not a manufactured product.
 
I'm not really a buyer of regular shafts, but I think I can shed some light on your question.

Plain old everyday hard maple sells for pretty cheap in lumber form. Like about $6 a board foot, or even less. A shaft dowel is 1" x 30", so it's 30 cubic inches. 1 board foot is 144 cubic inches. So a shaft is about 1/5 of a board foot, and even after you factor in the cuts and losses to get it to a 1" dowel, is worth about $3.

To get a pool cue shaft wood there are a couple of options.

You can just buy hard maple boards and offset the cuts for the grain and rip it up. If you're lucky, much of it is pretty stable and does not have a great deal of stress in it, and the yield will be pretty decent. Most likely, it will have a lot of ugly wood in it, and it won't be very stable because it was a bad log to use for shaft wood or it wasn't dried properly, or most likely both. If you get decent lumber and you're not picky about the looks of the shafts, you might get 50% or maybe even 70%. If you get picky about the looks or the wood has stress in it, that number can drop pretty dramatically.

You can also go to someone who knows about pool cue shafts. He will start with choosing special logs to mill, cut them the right way, and dry them the right way. Even with all that, he can't see inside the wood so he won't know if it may have some sugar or mineral show up while you're cutting it. Drying wood is not an exact science because all the boards in the kiln don't react exactly the same. So even though he did it right, some boards may have gone too far while others may not have gone far enough. Some will have stress in them. Period!

For pretty much all other applications of hard maple these are things that don't mean squat. But with pool cue shafts it's different. We want straight grain. We want high growth rings. We want no stress so they stay straighter than steel.

I can point you to places that will sell you maple dowels for under a buck a piece in quantity (a few thousand). But, you'd be lucky to get a good shaft out of 50 of them, and you'd have all the labor of cutting 50 in each shaft that makes it.

If you buy dowels, even from the guy who knows what he's doing, you will still get some with ugly spots or ones that move. But, at least the numbers are better than 1 in 50.

If you really want every shaft you cut to make it all the way, then the only way to get there is to buy them already cut most of the way down. To get them perfect at one pass from finished is going to be stupid expensive.


I know this may not help, but I think it's pretty close to reality. At least based on my experiences.

Royce
 
I once bought 100 dowels from a sawmill in the northeast that had been recommended to me as a source of affordable shafts. I didn't find a single one that I would use on any of my cues. Not one. There was one interesting one that had only 3 growth rings. On the other hand I have a supplier who manages to send me dowels that have about 40% yield. All that means is that my shaft cost is actually 2.5X the dowel cost and I have a lot of 1" dowels to use as cores or other things. Royce is dead nuts right, if you want all perfect shafts you won't be willing to pay the cost. Finally no one can guarantee what find will be to your liking.
 
I put my #1 Shaft Dowel Mix estimate at:
50% #1 or AAA Grade
40% #1.5 & #2 or A+ to B Grades
10% #3 or C Grade

In one inch dowels you could grade them all clean with zero surface blemishes, but once you cut into them they will have sugar lines show up that you could not see in the dowel form. And with the highest quality maple I have been able to purchase, around one out of 10 will probably have something really ugly appear. So instead of creating the hassle of sending shafts back and forth and raising the price about 30% to make up for that hassle and expense, I go ahead and let people know that they might expect a 10% loss. I for one having turned many thousands of shafts know guaranteeing every shaft dowel to finish up at a certain grade will create a business nightmare that neither the customer or supplier will want to go through. Shaft dowels are just rough cut material. If you want every shaft to be a guaranteed quality then you have to buy them at final sanding size. That is the only size that I guarantee the grade of.

Instead of viewing non tapered shaft dowels or squares as cut to size steaks. It would be more like buying a side of beef and telling the butcher you want him to guarantee every steak to be fat free and perfectly tender that comes from that side of beef. Or telling the guy who mines the diamonds to guarantee every rough stone will cut into perfect small stones with zero waste. Every experienced diamond cutter knows there will be some waste. So does every experienced wood turner. I suspect that the supplier you mentioned (which is not me) is just very plain spoken about his policies on returns.
 
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i should have been a bit clearer

i was not talking about shaft dowels, i was talking about shafts. shafts that were finished or near finish, shafts that were ready to use.
before i had a stock of shafts, on occasion i needed a shaft in a short time, as a customer was in a hurry. i would pay $25 each for shafts that were ready to use within resting a couple weeks in my shop.

i just dont understand why a supplier would ship shafts ready to use and say 10 % of them are no good.
 
desi2960 said:
i was not talking about shaft dowels, i was talking about shafts. shafts that were finished or near finish, shafts that were ready to use.
before i had a stock of shafts, on occasion i needed a shaft in a short time, as a customer was in a hurry. i would pay $25 each for shafts that were ready to use within resting a couple weeks in my shop.

i just dont understand why a supplier would ship shafts ready to use and say 10 % of them are no good.
Click to expand...

On final sanding size there is a 100% guarantee that they will arrive straight.
 
I have finish cut shafts hanging that have been dead straight for years, then a cold front moves in and they warp, then straighten again when things equalize. It's wood. Turning them to final size is the only way to know exactly what you have, and even then things can and often do go wrong for no apparent reason. If you have somebody who can keep a 90% success rate on finish cut shafts, then he's doing far better than I could. And you must consider that I actually log, mill, & dry my own wood.

I begin with trees that are straight as shafts, gently drop them usually uphill, quarter them parallel to grain, mill each quarter parallel to grain, toss away the few inches next to the pith, put them in a DH kiln immediately upon milling, and never subject them to temps above 100*f while drying. Literally, the wood is in the kiln drying the same day the tree was cut. Maybe extreme but I have learned my lesson on bacterial staining. Once dry, I have 3.5' long x 2"-6" wide billets that are as close to perfect as can possibly be for cues. I then straight line along the grain and resaw into shaft squares. The grain runs absolute from one end to the next, no run off. Any wavering is a grain anomaly, but each grain line can be traced end to end. I spent years & tons of money to learn how to do this all correctly, and am pretty dang confident in the process. Still yet, wood being wood, I lose much more than 10%. I lose wood at every step from tree to finished shaft. The last cut yielded around 1100bf of shaft billets, and by the time I got them to squares I had around 700 shafts. I will end up with maybe 400 shafts by the time they reach final size. That's the cold hard reality of making shafts. You lose them to pin knots, mineral stain, grain wiggle, movement, etc. It's things you cannot see in tree or log or lumber form.

Sorry for the long post. I just wanted to give perspective. Even when a cue maker himself does it through every step of the process, there's no guarantee. Unfortunately, you won't find many cue makers with chainsaws & logging equipment, sawmill, kiln, etc. that is willing to sell shafts to you. So what you have is commercial loggers cutting trees, timber brokers & mills buying logs, and if you are lucky the logs get milled with cue shafts in mind. Even then the mill operator isn't a cuemaker. He's only following instructions. Otherwise you get shafts from wood that is cut & dried in general manner to suit the majority of the woodwork industry. Again, 10% is a strong claim to make & if it can be met then you have an outstanding dealer. If I could buy finish cut shaft with my taper for $25 each and a 90% guarantee, I would never cut another tree. It seriously is one of those endeavors where huge losses are par for the course & to be expected.
 
^
Or you can buy Lilly white shaft dowels from a snake oil salesman who
claims all of his shaft dowels are AAA grade and are straight grain end to end
with both center grain dead center end to end.
But, he has no warranty on them.
 
Here's what mine typically look like as squares:

end grain - notice the grain is up/down, not diagonal by more than just a few degrees. That's result of quarter sawing. Once dowels, there's no way to know how the logs were milled. Quarter sawing avoids the common stress warping as the wood dries. It doesn't need to be strapped & weighted in the kiln so that it stays flat & straight. Quarter sawed wood dries flat naturally. This means less chance of the wood warping after it's cut into shafts, because there is significantly less internal stress than what's found in plain sawed wood that gets forcefully held flat in the kiln. Not a big deal for cabinets & chairs, but critical for cue shafts & archery arrows.


Overview - pretty consistent overall, no defects that would deem them unworthy of a shaft.


Down the grain view - pretty straight with a couple minor grain deviations, but every grain line runs one end to the next


All of these were cut in S.E. Ohio, not the UP Michigan or Ontario. They don't have a zillion grain lines but they don't have only a few, either. Range is from 10-30. They make shafts that range in weight from 3.4oz-4.7oz. at 13.15mm and my taper. Point being, maple is maple, regardless where it comes from. The quality comes not from where they were cut, but from which trees were cut, and how they were processed. They are clean, straight grain, dense, stable, and very natural color. They come out of the kiln looking like they did when they went in, same color as when the tree was cut. Still yet, as nice as these are & seemingly perfectly suited for cues, processed from the beginning with cue shafts in mind, I will lose 4-5 of these in the pictures. There will be a pin knot or mineral streak, or there will be an internal stress that gets relieved after a cut & cause warp. Even if you do everything perfect, every step of the way, there will inevitably be fairly significant losses. All I can do is avoid & negate as much loss as possible. But in the end, I eat the losses & can do nothing about it.
 
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