john,
You are really catch-22'ed. You can type until you are blue in the face however either you haven't cut up many cues from a wide variety of production sources or you have encountered the same thing as the average shop that does cue repairs. Shoddy workmanship on some production cues. Not because it can't be done better but because some factories choose to turn out crap to save a few pennies per unit.
When I find one shaft with the hole for the threaded insert drilled oversized so the wood doesn't have to be threaded that isn't an aberration like it can be in a shop where things are handmade, it is representative of the entire run whether that run is 100 shafts or 100,000 shafts. Production equipment turns out items of a consistent quality, that can be good or bad depending on the quality of item it is set up to produce.
Hu
I never said that I have cut up a lot of cues. I said Kao Kao has bandsawed a lot of cues and I have seen them.
repair shops see all sorts of things. I could tell a story about a cue repair that would be HIGHLY embarrassing to a well thought of US name brand but I won't. In fact I could tell a story about a famous custom cue maker's cue that would be even more embarassing but I won't do that either. The point is that no one is immune to building lemons occasionally.
What repair shops don't generally do is to cut the cue in half horizontally. If so I'd like to see the pictures.
Now, I agree that when they have to do some surgical repair such as changing one joint for another, changing the handle section, replacing a butt cap, then of course a repairman is apt to find all sorts of "interesting" construction methods. This applies to all brands of cues.
But the conversation isn't about specific cues, it's about the general state of cues today compared to 25+ years ago. And the general state is that the quality average is much higher than it was 25 years ago. Maybe not at the very top of the spectrum but the bottom and middle range are certainly way better as every person on this forum knows who has actively been involved with cues knows.
All of us have our anecdotes about shitty cues and "bad" construction methods.
Hell I ran a "crappy cue sale" on Ebay once to get rid of a super crappy batch of cues from Taiwan that I got stuck with. Best part was that the positive feedback I got from every buyer was essentially, "this cue is great and not crappy like you made it out to be."
Seyberts Billiard Supplies had purchased those cues from me. I has sold them to them as a favor to one of my Taiwanese contacts. All the cues developed problems and Seyberts returned them all. I put them away and didn't think about them again until I was cleaning up the shop years later.
And here is another interesting story - while cleaning up the shop at Sterling we came across about five boxes of full splice maple nose/ebony and rosewood four point cues with veneers from Taiwan that had been sitting there for years. We sold them as blank stock and it's a 100% guarantee that a lot of those cues were made into custom cues by US cue makers. The butts were all straight and "seasoned". The shafts were no good but the butts most certainly found new life as usable custom cues.
I fully agree that when something isn't "right" in a production setting then it's not right for hundreds or thousands of cues until it's fixed. I also agree that factories look to save money wherever they can. That's the whole point of being a factory, to make quality goods at the lowest possible cost which balances function with value.
But there is no way that every production cue is automatically worse than every custom cue. Nor are methods that are considered "shoddy" by your standards necessarily bad or detrimental to how the cue works. In any event I would be surprised if any repair man who has been in the business since 1991 or prior would come on here and say that production cues built today are on average worse than those built in 1991.
In any event I am totally done with this conversation. I know what I know and what I know doesn't even really matter because the industry marches on no matter what any of us think here. I know WHY Kao Kao invested millions into renovating their whole factory. I know what they did. And I have seen the results.
If they had no need to respond to competitive pressure and market demands then they probably would not have turned their factory into a supersized version of a small cue maker's shop.
That said....Kao Kao doesn't make cues because they are passionate about cues. And that passion is perhaps an ingredient that really does come through when you have a custom cue in your hands.
There will probably never be a one-size-fits-all cue. And that's a good thing because with 700+ active cue makers it means that consumers have more choice than at any other time in history to find the right cue and to have any cue tweaked to their specs.
I appreciate all of them, the small cue makers, the semi-production shops, the factories, the cue repairmen. I will always be grateful for all the education and warm welcome of all those who shared their knowledge and passion for building cues with me.
Lastly, I might be wrong but I think Mike Lambros is indeed an engineer and his UltraJoint is a product of an engineer's approach to cue performance. That's in reply to JVB's assertion that there is little or no actual engineering in cues. I think that there is a lot of it whether or not those doing it are degreed or not.
