john,
The cues all look the same on the outside, or nearly the same to an unsophisticated buyer looking to buy a cue under $200. The junk sells for the same price as some pretty decent cues. Some of the junk has as good or better reputation on AZB as far better cues. The competition only makes them keep up appearances. Surely in all your bisecting of cues you have found the same things I am talking about. This wasn't twenty-five year old cues.
Gold's words are gold. A lot goes into a top quality cue that will never be done on a production floor. Partially impossible to keep people that interested in a mass production environment. Partially the "good enough" attitude in production. When a production item is "good enough" then they start focusing on how to make it faster and cheaper without decreasing quality to the point it is no longer good enough. The pursuit of perfection doesn't exist on a production floor.
Hu
Of course you can't tell how a cue is internally constructed, for the most part, by looking at the exterior. The same applies to almost everything Hu, even people.
Yes, I agree that some cues are internally shitty. I said that in my first three posts.
I understand your comments but they simply are not true. You simply don't know what goes on in a cue factory. You don't. You make general statements about manufacturing which also are not true and try to apply them to cue manufacturing.
Your premise seems to be that because a cue is built in a small shop and presumably "custom" (because not all cues built in small shops are custom) then it's automatically going to be better than a production cue.
That's simply not true. It could actually never be true given the broad diversity in training, methods, supplies, woods, ability, machine tolerances, etc....that exist in cue making.
The fact is that a state of the art cue making operation can do precision work to tight tolerances and do it repeatedly. A cue factory can and does invest in specially built machines to do specific tasks over and over.
Cue factories can invest in better CNC lathes, they can automate just about every process to whatever tolerance they need.
They can do everything that a small cue maker can do and do it at scale. Does that mean every cue will be a perfect specimen? Of course not.
But we are talking a general curve here and that curve is upwards from 1991 in terms of overall quality. In other words the "bad" cues from China today are better than the best cues coming from Taiwan in 1991.
And good enough is not up to the factory, it's up to the customer. Be that customer the wholesale buyer or the end user. Ultimately the customer decides if the cues are good enough to continue buying and using.
This is why Meucci went through a period where dealers abandoned them. They didn't keep the quality at a level that was acceptable to the market.
You keep saying that there is junk that sells for hundreds of dollars, so what if there is? There was junk made in the USA by a few well known names that also sold for hundreds and even thousands of dollars. This is a very broad industry when it comes to cues with 700+ active cuemakers worldwide and dozens of factories with well over a 1000 brands. Of course there will be crap that is being sold for far more than it's worth when you have that much product on the market.
The point you don't seem to want to accept is that the OVERALL quality of cues is higher now than it ever has been.
For an example look at lifetime warranties. No one in 1991 offered a lifetime warranty on a pool cue. Nope, you bought it and it's your problem if it warps in three weeks.
Now many companies offer lifetime warranties on their cues. Because they know that they build cues good enough that the chances of warpage are fairly low and thus they plan for an acceptable amount of claims. No way that any cue maker or distributor would have offered that in 1991 unless their profit margins were insanely high to absorb the claims. But in fact as far as I know no one offered a lifetime warranty in 1991 or the decade that that followed it.
You can argue that a lifetime warranty is a marketing gimmick and to a degree they are. But any company that offers them has to be confident that they aren't going to face massive claims that eat up the profits.
They have to know for example that the rate of warpage in their cues is likely to be kept under 2% even under adverse conditions in order to offer such a warranty.
Now, back to the factory setting. If you were to have gone into Tim Scruggs' shop you would have seen hundreds of shafts hanging in various stages of turning. They would have been marked and graded and and dated.
If you go into Kao Kao's wood warehouse now you will see hundreds of thousands of shafts hanging on custom built racks floor to ceiling about 20ft high. They are all marked and graded and dated. Kao Kao in 2005 undertook a multi-million dollar renovation to essentially become a factory sized version of Tim Scruggs' shop. In essence they have duplicated the processes of small cue makers and scaled them up to factory proportions.
Putting this into perspective, 30 years ago they would use techniques from the furniture industry as the first cue makers in Taiwan were orginally furniture makers. They would go from a square to a 1.25" dowel in one pass then taper it in the next machine in a matter of minutes. Used to making big thick furniture they had no idea how wood would react when cut to such thin pieces so quickly.
Now they basically lay in wood and process it pretty much the same as good small cue makers do it. Small cut by small cut letting the wood season and stabilize. This is a much more expensive way to make cues when you figure the amount of wood they have to keep in the pipeline but they offset it by investing in a LOT of CNC processes to do the precision cutting.
I have seen this transformation first hand. This is where my perspective comes from.
I have also seen cues being made in shitty buildings with dirt floors and jump cues made in a lean-to.
Seen people doing Samsara style work in a room hardly bigger than a closet, seen shops which were so clean you could eat off the floor. I have seen at least five ways to cut shafts, one of which was a machine that cut 32 shafts at a time.
So respectfully, and I do mean that sincerely, please understand that I am not talking out of my ass here just to argue with you. I have seen the junk way more than you have ever held. I have also seen the evolution and rise in quality across the board. So please at least have some respect for those very real experiences that span the past 25 years which I have been a part of the billiard industry.
