In my opinion, there’s a vast difference between a cue brand made to be adjustable by the cue owner by swapping different pre-fabricated weight inserts and a cue maker’s manufacture approach to building cues, especially a custom cue maker like Richard Black. Admittedly, cue makers can use weight bolts, unless a customer has specified otherwise.
The difference is the cue maker uses a weight bolt to produce the target weight of the pool cue being made that the customer has specified, example being 18.75 ozs. or 19.5 ozs. Typically, a good cue maker would strive to use a bolt that’s the smallest and lightest. If you have a cue and it has a single 1 oz. weight bolt in the bottom of the cue butt, the balance is definitely affected versus having 1 or 2 small headless bolts in different positions within a cored cue’s butt.
I had one of my cues cored for using 7 grams headless bolts and I had Bob send me several bolts I could use if I
ever decided to. Even with its cored cue butt, Bob built it sans any weight bolt to within 0.05 ozs of what I specified.
My point is cue makers build your cue based on what you want and the elite ones, like Richard Black, build their cues without relying on a hefty piece of metal in the bottom of the cue to fulfill the customer’s order. Cues built to be weight adjustable are designed and constructed to accommodate weight changes easily performed by the cue owner. Two very different concepts and design approaches to cue building, at least the way I look at cue making and pool cues.