History behind LD shafts

galipeau said:
What is your source for this quote?? curious to know
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Somewhat of a predessor to this forum was the usenet group rec.sport.billiard. We had a lot of good discussions, and I remembered it because Thomas titled it "Rosabelle Believe," which was the code phrase Harry Houdini worked out with his wife to communicate with her from the afterlife...
 
pt109 said:
I didn't mean to imply that it wasn't the words of Thomas Wayne.
Thomas is an excellent writer and that was his article.

I just wanted to correct the info about Allan's name, the original company name that
became Predator later on, and I wanted to honor Steve Titus, who had a lot to do with
the original idea of low deflection....Steve could play pretty good, also.
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OMG...now I get what you were saying! It takes me a few minutes sometimes...and sometimes more than a few minutes! LOL
 
galipeau said:
What is your source for this quote?? curious to know
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This is a funny question. What I mean is that new posters on the Internet have no idea just how much shit we went through tback then when we first talked about the science of cues as an Internet community.

So, what was the source? It was Thomas Wayne. It was Ron Shepard. It was Bob Jewett. And yes, it was a Mike Page, a Pat Johnson, Ken Bour, Jim Buss, and (dare I say) a Fred Agnir.

That was the source. Those were the sources. Whether Thomas was 100% correct didn't matter. It was his Rosabelle Believe post that got many on the right path. As a mechanical engineer, I knew what made sense and what didn't. But ,in the end, this post is what got me really thinking about squirt from an ME pov. And lot of you all who get to understand and preach low squirt cues today owe your knowledge to everyone I just mentioned in this post. There really wasn't anyone else.

Preach away.

Freddie <~~~ and now they all teach me LOL!!!
 
Thanks Mikepage for letting me know where TW posted that originally. The rec.sport group was before my time.

To cornerman, I asked for the source out of curiosity only not out of doubt. That sounded exactly like Wayne's writing to me. I love reading this stuff, and although there are some excellently made "LD" products out there, I'm a solid maple kind of guy.

Ian <----- far from a preacher as can be
 
Kimmo H. said:
As I have always been quite the fan of LD shafts, I like how they feel and play. One day I got thinking about who made the first production LD shafts?, who came up with the term Low Deflection? When did they first appear in professional pool? etc. so I thought that this would be the right place to look answers to these questions :) If you happen to know something about this, please enlighten me a bit, I'd very much appreciate it. I bet there are many folks around who know a lot more than I do, as I'm way too young to know a thing about the history behind all this.

Feel free to comment, share your thoughts an memories :) First hand experiences with the older LD's would be off the charts nice to hear :wink:
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Bob Meucci coined the term "deflection" to talk about cueball angles off of the line of stroke. But anyone in the engineering field understands the term "deflection" as something else. That's why Bob Jewett coined a different term... squirt.., to discuss this angle.

If I had a powerful vote,these would be labeled as LS Shafts... low squirt shafts.

Freddie <~~~ but what do I know?
 
Cornerman said:
Bob Meucci coined the term "deflection" to talk about cueball angles off of the line of stroke. But anyone in the engineering field understands the term "deflection" as something else. That's why Bob Jewett coined a different term... squirt.., to discuss this angle.

If I had a powerful vote,these would be labeled as LS Shafts... low squirt shafts.

Freddie <~~~ but what do I know?
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I agree with the low squirt terminology here, although from a marketing pov, "squirt" doesn't sound ask that great ;)
 
Cornerman said:
... That's why Bob Jewett coined a different term... squirt.., to discuss this angle. ...
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A small correction. It was Jack Leavitt from Napa/Santa Rosa who was the first to use "squirt" for the phenomenon so far as I know. See item 108 in the Billiards part of Robert Byrne's "Standard Book of Pool and Billiards". I did pass the term on to Byrne. As engineer Fred has pointed out, to engineers the term "deflection" is a misuse here, and Byrne and I are also engineers.

Byrne downplays the importance of squirt in SBoP&B which to me is further evidence that nearly everyone learns (or learned at that time, 1978) how to compensate for squirt subconsciously.

Squirt is kinda-sorta mentioned in Hoppe's "Billiards As It Should Be Played" but he (or the actual author) connects the unexpected path of the cue ball to the "spinelessness" or some such of the cue stick.

As mentioned before, the "aim and pivot" (or "backhand english) method of squirt compensation was known and recommended over 100 years ago, long before the cause and partial cure of the problem was understood.
 
Cornerman said:
Bob Meucci coined the term "deflection" to talk about cueball angles off of the line of stroke. But anyone in the engineering field understands the term "deflection" as something else. That's why Bob Jewett coined a different term... squirt.., to discuss this angle.

If I had a powerful vote,these would be labeled as LS Shafts... low squirt shafts.

Freddie <~~~ but what do I know?
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I've always judged shafts by the terms 'push' and 'masse'...if I put right english and it goes
too far to the left ( for my personal liking ), I say it pushes for me....if the same shot goes
to far to the right, I say it masses.
Both actions can be a problem....I would only play snooker with a Z shaft.

To me, this gives me the picture of what actually happens....
...I can understand myself.....sometimes....:o
 
9Ballr said:
WELL SAID!!!!!! LOL :smile:

Couldn't agree more.

Pool's No. 1 myth.
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Not a myth at all, they do what they say they do.

The mistake that people make is thinking that going to an LD shaft will make them play better.

It may, it may not.

I say the same thing in every "what is the best shaft" thread I see, there is no best shaft, there is only the shaft that best matches how you play so it allows you and how you learned to hit the ball to pocket the ball and play with spin. It may be a very LD shaft, it may be a 1990s Meucci shaft with a 1.5" ferrule, it may be some combination of the 2 or something else.
 
Freddie...Another one of "those guys" around Meucci was my friend Willie Jopling. He was a great friend of Bob's, and he was the first one to talk and write about tangent line effects (and that was in 1950's). I'm sure that likely had some input about the term deflection. :thumbup:

Bill had a custom Meucci Cue that Bob made him, that was his favorite cue. You can see the cue in the video and on the box of the Trick Shot videotape of Willie Jopling's.

Scott Lee
http://poolknowledge.com

Cornerman said:
Bob Meucci coined the term "deflection" to talk about cueball angles off of the line of stroke. But anyone in the engineering field understands the term "deflection" as something else. That's why Bob Jewett coined a different term... squirt.., to discuss this angle.

If I had a powerful vote,these would be labeled as LS Shafts... low squirt shafts.

Freddie <~~~ but what do I know?
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Cornerman said:
A laminated shaft has zero to do with low deflection technology.
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That is so often interchanged with low deflection even among people that know something about the shafts it's crazy. I think that is 100% predators fault for using the pie construction in their shafts.

Like when people use the term CPU for the computer tower. "your game is running slow, what CPU do you have?" "It's a white Compaq".
 
Bob Jewett said:
As mentioned before, the "aim and pivot" (or "backhand english) method of squirt compensation was known and recommended over 100 years ago, long before the cause and partial cure of the problem was understood.
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Do you recall any old books that described the "aim and pivot" method Bob?

Colin
 
Scott Lee said:
... the first one to talk and write about tangent line effects ...
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Since we're talking sources.... You may want to check out Mosconi's "On Pocket Billiards" which shows the construction of the tangent line although it doesn't actually use the scary technical word "tangent". That's from 1948. Coriolis did use the word for the path of the cue ball off the object ball somewhat earlier although he was writing in French.

Coriolis 001.jpg

The more we learn, the more we learn that what we learned was already learned a long time ago.
 
Bob Jewett said:
Since we're talking sources.... You may want to check out Mosconi's "On Pocket Billiards" which shows the construction of the tangent line although it doesn't actually use the scary technical word "tangent". That's from 1948. Coriolis did use the word for the path of the cue ball off the object ball somewhat earlier although he was writing in French.

View attachment 390237

The more we learn, the more we learn that what we learned was already learned a long time ago.
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Bob, you, Dr Dave, and PJ are amazing....I love this stuff.

Ecclesiastes 1.9...."There is nothing new under the sun."

Now could you explain that casting process with no mould line that was lost centuries ago? :smile:
 
bstroud said:
It was Bob Meucci that first came up with the idea of LD shafts.

When I was in Colo. Springs in the mid 70's Terry Bell and Jimmy Rempe would call me from Bobs' office where the were experimenting with Ivory ferrules and the thin soft ferrule that Bob was using.

They had observed that the soft ferrule squirted the cue ball less than Ivory ferrules.

I thought they were crazy.

Now I play with a LD shaft and a very soft and thin ferrule. Go figure.

Bill S.
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You are exactly right. I put on a tournament in the early 70's and he came selling cues. He did a spiel like a guy in a medicine show on the properties of his shafts and deflection and so on.

Rempe would hit shots with a huge amount of inside spin and pocket the balls. The kind of shots with most shafts you just took a wild guess at where to hit the ball to compensate for all that spin. We are talking more then 40 years ago long before any of these other guys Meucci was on the case.
 
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I had Richard Black make me a cue back in 1978 and when it arrived it came with a little Xerox sheet of paper maybe two pages long..like a folded brochure in the old days. It was titled something like "The Care and Feeding of a Fine Pool Cue" and it was written by Richard Black (or one would assume, because his name was titled on it).

He told how to clean the cue, wrap, etc...simple stuff concerning taking care of the cue. There also was a bit about cue construction I think and something about ivory ferrules and there was a paragraph or so and if I can remember correctly I think he used both terms "deflection" and "squirt" in it and in the manner it was written it suggested that it was a theory of some cue makers. At the time, Richard's standard cues all came with two shafts and ivory ferrules (unless you requested something else).

Nowhere in it did it say his cue were any lower deflection than anybody else's from what I can remember. I think that was the first time I ever heard either of the words used describing shaft characteristics.
 
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