French Brunswick Before & After

runscott

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
This is a very old 'Made in France' Brunswick. 'Before' measurements were 25.5" shaft, 28" butt. Ferrule was a standard ivory playing cue width.

The cue was trashed: joint cracked in half, ivory butt-cap almost disintegrated, points all popped with veneer bits missing, bad staining (like black ink) and white paint on the forearm. The butt-plate veneers and ebony-side veneers were also damaged as shown. The wood was amazingly dry.

I only restored the wood: scrubbied the forearm with magic eraser, careful to preserve the 'Brunswick' and 'made in France' stampings. I could not remove all of the ink stains, nor get rid of all the old yellow-orange finish remains around the stamps and points. I then glued and clamped the points and repaired the point veneers. The forearm maple was a beautiful white when done; however, I chose to use Danish oil to seal in order to blend the remaining stains better - as a result the forearm is darker. You can still see minor ink and paint stains, but they do not detract much. After French-polishing the cue, I removed the original wood pin from the shaft - bad cracks in the shaft had been repaired with tiny nails.

The next part of the job was the most difficult. I sent the cue to a master cue-maker who created a shaft from the original pin, a new joint, new butt-cap, new wedge, new butt-plate veneers and wedge veneer repair. I will leave out details of his work, as I plan to call him and invite him to respond to this thread if he feels so inclined. I am certain I will never again in my life get a chance to collaborate (somewhat) with a real cuemaker, especially one of his skill level, so this is naturally the prized cue of my collection, and will be passed down to future generations.

Playability (all cues are meant to be played!). I took this cue to a local bar with an 7' table and discovered that it is the best small-table cue I have ever played with. I don't believe I lost a game all night. So I guess the last game it lost might have been in the 1910's or 1920's.

When the light is right I will take a full-length photo.
 

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Original shaft next to the new one, 'Before & After' of the wood pin, and the pin end of the old shaft taken apart:
 

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Very nice Scott, I'm sure this is a gem in your collection !

All the best,

DaveK
 
Thanks Guys! Wanted to add: the goal here was to preserve the history of the cue as much as possible. We broke that rule twice - the new shaft is several inches longer than the original. Someone pointed out in another thread that it might have been a carom cue originally. The other instance was the butt treatment - it came with an ivory butt cap that looked to be hand-carved around the bottom, and an orange bumper. A rounded butt would have been interesting; however, I have never seen one on a cue this old. A rubber bumper would have looked not-so-great, so we didn't do it.

WW - it's not the type of work he normally does, so I thought I would leave it to him to post and comment if he so desires.
 
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Love the cue. Glad to finally see the before and after pics.

I still kick myself for passing that one up.

I think the end result is really nice.


.
 
Love the cue. Glad to finally see the before and after pics.

I still kick myself for passing that one up.

I think the end result is really nice.


.

I apologize for taking so long on the pics. My home is the anti-photo place - I found a 30-minute window of good conditions and quickly took pictures of four cues.

Thanks for your comments. As far as passing it up goes, it really didn't look like much when I received it. I would not have bid except for the propellor stamp.
 
.

Great to see that old French Brunswick saved. I was lucky enough to find an old French "fish pole" cue that has some similar design elements to yours. It also has a really nice ebony spliced shaft.

This cue is not for sale.
 

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I apologize for taking so long on the pics. My home is the anti-photo place - I found a 30-minute window of good conditions and quickly took pictures of four cues.

Thanks for your comments. As far as passing it up goes, it really didn't look like much when I received it. I would not have bid except for the propellor stamp.

It was the propeller stamp that attracted me as well. But the condition put me off.

Obviously I was wrong.

But I am happy that somebody on the forum got it so at least we get to enjoy it here. :thumbup:

.
 
Scott....Thanks for the nice compliments. Always an enjoyable experience working your projects. Although the butt was relatively straight for its age, it was a little egged shaped in places where it would have been easier to work with had it been round. Just took a little more hand sanding and fitting on the joint collar. We wanted to minimize sanding on the maple forearm as much as possible and just let the chips fall where they may. The white wedge was also a bit of a challenge seeing that some of the black inner veneer had some chunks missing and it was not a perfect triangle as it may appear. After meticulously cleaning all the old glue off for a flat gluing surface, I realized how the cue construction was originally achieved in the double wedge area of the butt and luckily found why the cue had a rattle noise in it. I was able to eliminate the noise and proceed to replace some sections of the ebony veneer and hand sand and test fit the triangle many times to get it fit properly.
Being able to save the shaft pin was huge. Even though after removing the rusty metal (gotta love the I can fix anything repair guys) I found that it wasn't exactly straight, I was able to work around and get it installed in the new shaft with minimal extra work.
All in all even though we didn't put it back 100% original, I think we saved a nice one.
A few more pictures for the viewing crowd......
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French Brunswick

Great find and the right decision to restore it like you and Dave did it.
It's always a pleasure to see how a piece of history is getting a new tasteful life.
 
Here is a full-length photo
 

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