I would be profoundly amused to hear from anyone who buys a cue from an incompetent, fraudulent cuemaker just to spite me.
If it was Zen to dwell upon the past or the future, I would wager that I can guess the names of three AZBers who would do so.
If anyone chooses to buy a Chuck Starkey cue, I recommend one that is nothing more than unembellished wooden dowels stuck together end to end. I've played with such a Starkey since last Thanksgiving. It's very Zen in its simplicity and the richness of its cocobolo and curly/birdseye maple. I get a lot of compliments on it. Since I had a Sniper tip installed, the cue's chi and mine flow strongly together.
But avoid anything Starkey with splices or inlays, no matter how simple. He
can't do them right (else he would, instead of just refunding money and shopping for a more gullible customer), doesn't care to, and will castigate
you when it's unsatisfactory.
I'm beginning to see why message lengths here are limited to 1,500 characters, including white spaces.
The two "favors" I'm repaying to Chuck are:
1. Concealing the
hideously flawed maple in his first eBay sale of this cue - that side of the cue was conveniently face-down in the photos and unnoted in the description.
No competent cuemaker would let such a POS out of his shop; and
2. Lying to me about the Predator 314 shaft in the second sale, not once but three times. He didn't have to check any "book" to know that the shaft was not a Predator before he listed it or sent me his confirmation letter. He didn't claim to have checked his "book" until I nailed him red-handed with Predator's and Clay Etheridge's testimony.
He's also peddling degraded Predator and Tiger shafts to an unknown number of others "all the time", without telling them that he has replaced the vendor's low-mass ferrules with his own. I'm sure Predator and Tiger won't appreciate the harm to their reputations done by this fraud. It also shows that he is abysmally ignorant of low-squirt shafts.
As for Chuck's claim to have invested "more than $500" in the cue's materials ($620+ in the first go-around), my cuemaker says,
Amazing... that cue with an ivory butt and joint would still be only $200 worth of materials. As it was, to have paid $500 he would have had to screw up about 4 whole cues to get the one (semi) good one.
Chuck now claims to be scheming to gouge a "local player", presumably someone who knows and trusts him, a thousand dollars for a cue that is
"an absolute P O S. (of) Very shoddy workmanship," as another of his eBay customers recently put it in feedback. My cuemaker's appraisal is,
I think he's probably full of shit, (again) and will be lucky to get $400 for that pile of crap. If his buddy really wants to throw $1000 bucks away, and is ignorant as to what constitutes a quality cue, (and actually exists) maybe old Chuck will get to unload it after all.
BTW, the similiar cue being built by a master cuemaker will cost me $825, and I have not the slightest doubt that it will be flawless. We're on our third piece of snakewood now, the first two having turned down to the maker's dissatisfaction.
