Are we seeing the end of wood cues?

buckshotshoey said:
All you said could be true. But you start by including torrified wood as "came into being to cut production overhead losses due to culling and the lower overall quality of the better grades of maple to produce a quality shaft".

I disagree with that part. Torrified shafts have to start with grade AA wood to produce a usable high quality shaft. And there is the add cost of the baking process.
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Lot's of shaft wood meets very high standards with the exception of sugar marks which baking hides. And I mean in today's forests a LOT.
 
Deruki said:
Lot's of shaft wood meets very high standards with the exception of sugar marks which baking hides. And I mean in today's forests a LOT.
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But... torrificatuon will not remove them completely. And sugar marks will not affect playability. I haven't seen a shaft yet where I couldn't pick out some sort of defect. Depends on the individual definition of defect. Maybe some custom shaft won't have a defect of any kind but you will pay for it.
 
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middleofnowhere said:
I should probably add a little bit to my own comment to clarify it. I'm not saying there won't be any market for fancy collectible cues. But the average guy in a pool room who's influenced by players that he respects we'll see the best players just playing with essentially off the shelf cues that are well within his price range. The idea of ordering a cue for quite a bit of money and waiting 2 years will just at a point become silly.
It may already seem silly.
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Oddly enough, in my local room the top 5 to 10 players don't use CF. That hasn't stopped the onslaught of CF owners from hacking it up....lol
 
Deruki said:
Have the big leagues gone away from wood? I thought it was still required.
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It is required--a few decades ago many leagues played-around-with aluminum bats, but by and large they reverted to wood bats.

The overall weight of the bat and its distribution are critical to the performance of the bat. CF, being so light is no help, here.
 
The_JV said:
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Oddly enough, in my local room the top 5 to 10 players don't use CF. That hasn't stopped the onslaught of CF owners from hacking it up....lol
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I still play with an allwood cue that I made probably 40 years ago. But I could see myself if I was a new player playing with a cf. Likely those players you're referring to are players who have played with the same cue for years and they're not about to really make a change.
 
Most higher end production wood shafts are no longer juast a tree branch dried and turned down to size. They are various configurations of wood strips glued/laminated together. Make the strips thin enough and at some point the wood is just reinforcement of the glue/resin. A carbon fiber shaft is just a mix of resin and carbon fiber reinforcement. How much and what kind of carbon fiber is used, how it is oriented and what resins are used varies and all CF shafts are no more the same than all wood shafts are the same.

Using CF is a bit odd other than it's marketing value. The weight save isn't needed, the high strength isn't really needed.

CF ( or fiberglass or graphite or graphene) reinforced composite shafts are less susceptible to temp and humidity changes, probably are more consistent from shaft to shaft and more durable. For some that is enough. Like the fiberglass reinforced cuetecs of the past, they would likely only be house cues at bowling alleys if they were cheaper.

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I have to wonder when they will start making pool cue shafts out of hemp fiber Instead of carbon fiber. It would be a lot cheaper. And Probably almost as strong.

It would bring new meaning to the phrase "potting a ball"😁
 
Zerksies said:
Pretty much all sports equipment that was once made out of wood is now carbon fiber. I see it as the future, but i think a few things need to be addressed.

I like wraps, so I'm not sure can you put a wrap on a CF cue? Is it possible to cut out a channel in CF for a wrap?

Design wise we could always do paint, I also see people dipping things in decals too is another possibility. Plain cue's are just plain boring.

With this technology i would think we could have the possibility of having a truly adjustable cue with a weight and balance point.
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See any cf snooker cues or billiard cues?
 
greyghost said:
CF/spliced/laminated/torrified shafts all came into being to cut production overhead losses due to culling and the lower overall quality of the better grades of maple to produce a quality shaft.

The splicing and laminating tech gave the ability to reduce overall stresses, separate or average out densities and internal stress bt/winter and summer growth of the wood.

Players 100% wouldn’t have just started paying 4-600$ for a plain maple shaft of the highest quality to high roll the bangers on shorter availability from some of the major manufactures like predator and such….

The “tougher” surface and exponentially more consistent finished product from cf can and was marketed to command such prices.

It was all business and economics not playability and capability of cf materials being that superior to wood.

If o ran a major production manufacturing cue company I’d 100% utilize CF as a main stay….and maybe a high end line of cues with wood shaft tech.

I think one day wood will become bioengineered and they will do things like grow high GPI maple blanks in a test tube in a matter of months or weeks...to me that doesn’t seem that far fetched in the distant future.

Someone’s got to use CF with all the makers out there , production and custom in quantity having exploded over the past 30 years there really just isn’t enough of the good stuff for everyone to be able to acquire it…..companies like McDermott and others own a lot of Forrest land they harvest their own from fwiw. Good cues don’t come from the same lots of wood processed for making chairs and counter tops and such….cues habe highly specific needs to be done well as we all know.
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Agree pretty much across the board with you except for bioengineered wood. Much easier and cheaper to engineer the materials to give them other desirable characteristics that we may never see in wood. That's been the story in all other sports. Skis have honeycomb graphite structures to reduce weight and properly distribute flex and stiffness. Tennis racquets have been engineered to have different flex and vibration absorption properties. Lots of fun with baseball bat properties as described earlier, and there's always huge money in golf. The things you can do with bicycle frames now were inconceivable 50 years ago.

I believe that the next step in the evolution of pool cues will be major cost reductions for cf shafts. Unfortunately, we will also see some who use that as an excuse to reduce the quality as a way of reducing costs. Hopefully with a small and discerning market like we have for the upper end of pool cues, we'll continue to see high quality shafts, just maybe not at the over premium prices out there today. As for the cue butts, we'll probably have the artistry of wooden cue butts for ages, but look for some interesting carbon fiber designs showing up there also.
 
I started out with maple shafts in early 90's. Early 2000's went to Predator. Tried 314-2, OB, Pro Shaft, 314-3, Vantage. My dad had a Edge Hybrid. About 5 years ago I got an itch and went back to maple. Best thing I've ever done in pool. Few months ago I bought and tried a Revo 12.4. There is not a single shot on the table I can't make with all three of those types of shafts. Including huge draw back shots from long distance or heavy english. I can interchange each type and never miss a beat. Returned the Revo and got my money back. But to me, maple feels and plays the best. The idea of paying 500 bucks or 350 just for a shaft seems so stupid to me now. It's not needed. But if you like it, hey, suit yourself.
 
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