Deflection vs stiffness

K

KHoog21

New member
Curious of others thoughts on this. Is a lower deflection shaft more flexible or stiff?? I have a JF classic shaft and it is extremely flexible like a house cue. Also I have a Rhino 12.4 and it's as stiff as a steel rod. I've played with a 12.9 revo recently and it's pretty Damm flexible, not even remotely close to as stiff as a Rhino. The JF SMO is extremely flexible as well alot more felxible then there Classic Shaft. People claim the Rhino is very low deflection almost revo low but the stiffness it 5x stiffer then any other carbon shaft I've used. The JF classic has the most deflection of any I've used but is also middle of the road flex wise. Rhino stiffest, SMO Most flexible. Custom cue maker claims stiffer is less deflection....
Make sense of this.....
 
Low deflection has to do with the overall weight of the front 6 inches of the shaft, and very little to do with materials, Young's modulus, construction,...

A wooden shaft with 11mm ferrule and tip is already LOW deflection without any special stuff
A wooden shaft with 11.5mm ferrule and tip and a hole drilled in the end is also low deflection.
From here, and the tip-size grows, so does the diameter of the hole drilled in the end of the shaft--just to keep the end-mass down

Once you get in to non-wood builds, you can construct the properties you desire--assuming you know the properties you desire (seldom).

Shaft stiffness has to do with the cube of diameter of the shaft as it tapers from joint to tip.
Tapers are used to control how stiff a shaft is and where the point of bending is positioned.
 
This has been a thing people have asked about probably since the 80s, because our world experiences and "feel" tell us that a stiff object will have more of an effect on something than a softer one. A hard baseball bat driving a ball further than a soft one for example. But stiffness does not really matter to deflection, some of the lowest deflection shafts like the Revo, are stiffer than most other shafts. I shot with the JFlowers SMO, but I don't think it's that flexible, stiffer than a Cynergy, but not as flexible feeling as say a 314 or a Meucci shaft. The whole stiff shafts have more deflection idea is about as flawed as the logic flat earthers use, they "feel" it should be flat, so they say it is, but actual facts and experience show otherwise. Sometimes a stiff shaft deflects more than a more flexible one, but due to other factors, and the stiffness of the hit is simply a side-affect of the construction. For example, if a car is slow and heavy you may say "heavy cars are slow, light cars are fast", but the speed is actually set by many factors, and it could simply mean that the slowness of the car is due not to the weight but by a weak engine or shitty tires. The speed of the car is simply a result of all the factors you can put in to control it. So you can't say "stiff shafts deflect more because they bend less" since it's flawed logic like saying heavy cars are slow.
 
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