Lathe

cuemaker03 said:
Fly out, I have plenty of lathes for you!!! And about 900 shafts!!!
Hold on to them.
Someone might just make a kick azz taper/point cutting/inlaying machine .
It will inspire you to make cues.
 
Hierovisio said:
There are repair people in the area but I want to be able to take a shaft home and make modifications based on ideas I got playing with it (taper-wise). Thanks for the feedback.

Well, if I understand you correct you would like to change the tapper on a excising shaft? This is something which could be done on a wood lathe where you usually sand these down to the correct tapper.

If you however would like to MAKE a shaft, you would need that tapper bar where you could adjust you're "ideas" and make them. Making a shaft is not done by hand "turning" the shaft. You would need some constructions of additional devices since the tapper is not changing linearly as for a butt. It changes along the shafts length which I guess you know. If you feel like doing this by hand, please feel free to try, but this would mess up a lot of wood for you. This is something a metal lathe can't help you with out of the box either. If you however don't feel like moving those hand-wheels by hand as the cutting "device" goes down the shaft then...

It's a lot of bit's and pieces and know how needed to do this. In practical terms, many of the cue builders on this forum is using a "shaft - tapper machine" which is something far from a lathe. This could be bought from Unique products (http://www.uniqueinc.com/taper_shaper) or if you have some mechanical skills, make one you're self. See also Chris Hightowers web page www.cuesmith.com and you would see that the so called "lathe" is something which is custom built for the art of pool cue manufacturing.

Have you're friend buying some of this equipment and you could get going :D

N
 
cuemaker03 said:
Or he could get some pre-tapered shafts from me and be way ahead of the game.

He he, that would be the best :D

Not to hijack the thread but have you experimented with some layered shafts Cuemaker ? In stock?
 
WilleeCue said:
Harbor Freight has some wood lathes for under $100.
Buy one of them and start taking orders for custom cues.

In reality a wood lathe just isnt much use to a cuemaker other than for sanding and perhaps (if rigged up right) doing wraps.

Just once I would like to see some "soon to be cue maker" say they were going to read Chris Hightower's book on cue making or invest in some DVD's to learn what they will need in the way of equipment.

I paid around $200 and bought Chris's DVDs - and realized it probably isn't for me. Probably saved me thousands up on thousands. LOL
 
It is a lot easier to just bring the cue to your local repairman and get it fixed up. Also leaves a lot more time for actually playing pool which is why people do this stuff in the first place. When I started there was just no one around doing it so I took the plunge.
 
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