I have a great Bob Owen Bushka tribute cue. It came with 2 shafts of course. I played with one for a couple of months giving no thought of using the other shaft. The shafts are the same ...weight,size,tips and ferrules. I decided to play the unused shaft one day and I did not like it as well as the one I used all the time. Is it strange that the one I prefer has a very slight roll and the other shaft is perfect. Maybe the pool gods are messing with me.
Favorite shaft
- Thread starter chuckg
- Start date
First thing to notice is that Bob uses a different taper on his cue shafts that affects the feel.
Bob also doesn’t mismatch the cue shaft weight with the cue’s butt weight. He does it right.
And lastly, shaft wood can and will vary despite the best efforts and intentions of a cue maker.
That’s just how it goes but really good cue makers recognize this & therefore are very selective.
Bob also doesn’t mismatch the cue shaft weight with the cue’s butt weight. He does it right.
And lastly, shaft wood can and will vary despite the best efforts and intentions of a cue maker.
That’s just how it goes but really good cue makers recognize this & therefore are very selective.
Play with it for a few months and then go back, imo.
I have a lot of shafts and differences are definitely discern able.
Sometimes one feels better than another and a change is needed to get the 'feels' of the day.
I have a lot of shafts and differences are definitely discern able.
Sometimes one feels better than another and a change is needed to get the 'feels' of the day.
I have found that the denser/older/tighter grain shafts tend to have a better hit feel. I had a Joss that had a great shaft with it, tried plenty of other Joss cues and shafts and others tried mine, and mine was almost always a clear winner. This is one of the reasons I have the philosophy that the butt of the cue is mostly a handle for the shaft. Once you start swapping shafts around you lose the soul of the cue. There is really very little reason to buy an expensive custom cue then stick some common mass market shaft on it, you can do the same thing with a $200 cue and get almost the same result both in performance and hit feel.
Assuming a 12.5 mm tip, “3 tips” of English wouldn’t even touch the 2.25“ cue ball.
Just sayin...
Agree, I would say shaft is 70% of feel. recently I had Mike Gulassy restore a McDermott D-18 and had him take the ring off the original shaft and replace with his PHX shaft. About 10 years ago Paul Dayton mated a shaft to the same butt. Both play great but very different hit and feel. I've had the PHX for several months and it took that long to acclimate to it. Been playing on and off with that butt for 30 years.
As a general statement, the closer to the hit the more important a component is. The tip, then the ferrule, then the shaft, the joint, on back. However, that is quickly proven false if something is really bad or really different. I had one bumper between two cues. One day I decided I just wouldn't bother swapping the bumper to the cue I was using. Much to my surprise, it was unplayable without a bumper!
I had my sister watching estate sales and such for cues since she frequents such things. Quickly discovered it was a bad idea but not before she purchased one of the under twenty buck Budweiser cue and case combinations for a few dollars. Sitting around my shop one day I got to feeling silly and went to work. I drilled out the butt as deeply as I could and cored it with a decent piece of maple. Put a nice three-eighth pin in the butt to match the quality insert going in the new shaft. Turned a nice shaft, nice ferrule, Moori II medium tip. Off to the local pub with a half-dozen tables. I wasn't known there but as soon as I laid the case on the table three or four kids crowded around to see my sneaky, so much for that! I had test hit the cue just out of curiosity so I had a baseline. Much to my disappointment, the cue still hit like caca! If I had to make a guess it had moved about halfway from pure crap to a decent, but not great, hitting cue. I think I would have had to fully core the butt and rewrap it to get it into moderately acceptable range. The butt was made out of a very soft wood like poplar. I think that would have killed the hit to a large extent no matter what changes I made.
On the other hand, many years ago I needed a shaft for my moochie on the fly. I went to a store that stocked a lot of Dufferin cues. Went through about twenty of them and selected the nicest shaft. I don't know what they thought when I gave it the ping test on the floor! They didn't say anything though. The butt was one piece wood. Stained maple I believe but this was in the late eighties or early nineties, too long ago to be positive. This butt played every bit as good as the moochie.
If we build a speed burner of a computer to play with and put one major bottleneck in the system, it isn't going to perform better than the bottleneck allows. The same is true of the pool cue, if it is a major bottleneck like that very soft poplar butt.
Hu
One of my very best playing cues started playing like a car running on a flat tire all of a sudden and it took me a bit to figure it out. The inside of the rubber bumper had torn loose from the screw holding it in. You couldn’t see anything wrong from the outside.
Replaced the bumper and it played perfectly again.
It's actually a bit funny how much difference having the bumper on the cue makes, there is a huge feel difference with one and without one (at least for cues made to have one). I played with a cues with a missing bumper, or one that I just took off to mess with for a bit, and the hit feel is like going from driving a Mercedes to an early Hyundai, went from being solid and stable to feeling like you are plying with a bundle of loose sticks.
As long as there is a well constructed butt the shaft is on, it will be good. Taking a high end cue from a maker and swapping out to a Revo or some other shaft other than the original is what I feel to be silliness. You buy the cue from the maker based on their full playing experience, if you take the main performance and hit feel out of their cue, what's the point really past just having a high end cue price and design? It's like going to a 5 star restaurant then making the chef change the meal with substitutions. You may as well just go to TGI Fridays or something if you do that.
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David,I started playing in era the of slow cloth and no magic shafts. I was always about getting the proper angle to help move Whitey along.I can and will juice the cue ball up when I have to but I make a higher percentage of shots if I use a minimum of english.
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