Hi,
The spine of the shaft contour and stiffness will play into the mix concerning deflection. I think the LD has more to do with the end of the shaft. Look at a billiard shaft big spine small at the end.
If you have a skinny thin shaft taper with an overall lighter weight what you have is a speggetti noodle. Yea, I know some people like speggetti noodles, I am not knocking them, just not my cup of tea.
Having a 3.4 oz shaft is having almost 25% less shaft than a 4.2. I think the number one feature in shaft wood is density and I for one want nothing to do with a 3.2 oz. shaft on the cues I make.
For shaft dowels, I hand select through hundreds of 5/4 kiln dried "UP" planks just to get 5 or 6. My main selection features are 1/4 sawn straight grain, straightness and non crowning, and weight in that classification order. If they make the grade in all of the first 4 classifing features and don't make the weight, I reject it without a second thought.
I agree with Eric Crisp that there are many factors for judging a shaft. I don't care about color too much if the shafts are paired correctly with matching features.
In my view processing your own shaft wood is the singular most important element a cue maker can do to make his cue hit in a certain & consistent way. If you are purchasing you dowels from some dowel merchant you loose the ability of the collation control that you get selecting planks. Without that all you get is random blanks from all of the trees in the forest, not the best pieces from the best trees. Pretty important reasoning!!
No shaft merchant is going to give you his best shaftwood cheap. He will charge high dollars A+++ or what ever sales decription he invents that is totally subjective. Even when you buy a batch at the high price, you will alway have some in there that are OK but not the best. My cost is $ 3.00 per square and I have total control.
Many threads here talk about Cue Makers, cues and each person's take or contribution to the hit they want to produce and like. Until I bought my doweling machine my shafts were purchased from merchants and I had no control, other than to reject. Being human, I found out that the natural tendency was to reject a shaft for a fancy cue and would say in my mind, "I can use it on a $ 350.00 simple sneaky pete. After processing these "light" losers to final taper I soon realized that these shaft wobbled between centers when spun and did not have the hit I wanted. I had not touched my cue shop book by DPK in many years and I revisited it and he was very specific about cutting your own squares for shaft selection.
The problems lies in the natural human justification to keep that "bad cookie" shaft and use it for a cheaper cue. Bad Idea!! What you do when you practice in that art is screw your customer and your brand and for what to save a few bucks. That is a lose / lose situation that will kill your reputation and your ability to make world class cues with the acceptance to charge high dollars from your customers. When people understand that they are getting the best of the best in shaft wood because you take the time to make it so, everybody wins and everybody's happy.
Today, I only have about a 6% rejection rate of my dowel stock and of the other 94% I use 2 out of three of the rods for shafts and the 1 out of three goes for my full coring dowels. If there is sugar streaks or slight imperfections of appearance they become a straight 30" coring dowel buried in a glue hole.
Statistical process control is your friend and reveals information that makes your final product more consistent in performance characteristics.
JMO
Rick G
If the taper and size on the shafts is the same but one weights 3.5 and the the other 4.4 I would guess the heavier shaft
