Joss Cues - Custom or Production?

D

DrCue'sProtege

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
somewhat confused here?
is there such a thing as a Production Joss Cue as well as Custom Joss Cues that Dan Janes makes personally? the one i purchased from Platinum Billiards earlier this week, is it a custom or production? production i assume? but does Dan Janes personally make all of his cues with his bare hands?

or are some Joss Cues strictly from a production line, like the Cuetec cues?

can someone enlighten me here?

DCP
 
Joss Cues

In the 60's, Dan Janes and Bill Stroud started Joss cues in MD. They were soon joined by Tim Scruggs. Bill Stroud moved out to Colorado, I think, and started making Joss West cues. These were all custom cues. Tim Scrugggs moved to Baltimore and started building Scrugg's custom cues. Dan Janes continued to build Joss cues. Most of the Joss cues today are production cues. Dan makes a few custom cues a year. The Joss production cues are some of the best production cues on the market, IMHO.
Don P. :cool:
 
DrCue'sProtege said:
somewhat confused here?
is there such a thing as a Production Joss Cue as well as Custom Joss Cues that Dan Janes makes personally? the one i purchased from Platinum Billiards earlier this week, is it a custom or production? production i assume? but does Dan Janes personally make all of his cues with his bare hands?

or are some Joss Cues strictly from a production line, like the Cuetec cues?

can someone enlighten me here?

DCP
Click to expand...

Danny Janes and Bill Stroud (of Joss West fame) started Joss Cues in Baltimore in 1968 and together they built some of the best cues available at that time. A lot of famous players were using Joss cues then. According to Danny, in 1972 Bill Stroud sold out his share of Joss Cues and moved to Colorado where he began making Joss West Cues. Today, Bill continues to make custon cues one at a time. When Bill Stroud left, Danny hired Tim Scruggs to work with him in Baltimore and together they continued to make excellent custom cues one at a time. Then, toward the later 1970's, Mike Siegel began working with Danny and Tim and all three were building Joss Cues. In 1978, Tim left Joss Cues and started his own company and he and Bob Frey began making Scruggs custom cues one at a time. I'm not sure when Mike Siegel left Joss Cues but it must have been sometime in the late 70's or early 80's. In the early 1980's, Joss Cues really took off and began to grow into the production cue company they are today. Danny and his son Steve, and I'm sure a few other people make a lot of cues today. Strickly production cues but very good none the less. If the points on a Joss cue are slightly rounded instead of razor sharp, you will know that the cue was not really made entirely by hand. It just takes too much time to inlay points or to build spliced blanks for that matter. I'm sure Danny would still make a custom cues to your specifications but I seriously doubt that he would be involved in its construction from beginning to end like he used to be. He stays very busy in the shop trying to keep up with all of the orders. Ralph Souquet uses a modern Joss that was probably made by Danny but then again, he's a famous player and is a good advertisement for Joss Cues. Anyway, the cue you just bought, assumng it was a new Joss, is more than likely a production cue...meaning there are many more out there just like yours. That doesn't mean it isn't a very good cue. It just means that you aren't the only one to have one like it. I wouldn't spend more than a couple of hundred dollars on a production cue. You can go to a custom cue maker like Rick Phillippe or Tim Scruggs (and dozens more like them) and have one made to your specs for a lot less than $1000.00. There won't be a lot of ornamentation but the hit will be there and if you take care of it, you'll have it for the rest of your life.
 
Go to http://josscues.com/cues/customcues.asp and you'll be able to "customize" a cue to have any one of the designs that are available for the butt and the different designs with/without inlays for the forearm. These are not available through the different distributors that sell Joss production cues.

Dan will occasionally do a custom cue himself, here's a beauty that he did for Ralf Souqet. It's the ivory and turquoise one on the front page.
http://www.veith-group.de/pages/kg/start_cues.html
 
Joss

Dan Janes is not only a GREAT cue maker, he's a fine man on top of that. He works 6 days a week and does build about 10 to 12 truely custom cues per year, when time permits.
He's got a great family, and they also, work very hard.

His production cues are well above some of the so called custom cue makers, cues out there. Consistancy, style, beauty, playability and value for your dollar.That's Joss cues.

In another post above, someone mentioned that billy stroud built only customs. This is true today, but no so yester year. Billy, told me a few years back, that when he first moved out west, he did have a production shop with 9 or 10 employess. Didn't work out like he wanted it to.
Blud
 
I have a Joss cue that Danny said he built for me. It isn't anything like the Joss cues from any brochures I have seen.

Most new Joss cues found in stores were most likely made in a production enviroment.

As someone who has been in the industry for going on 16 years I can tell you that Joss is one of the cues which is made by a player, consistently delivers a good hit and has great quality and workmanship.

John
 
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