A few observations
I had a home table when I was in my teens, junk granted but I bought a two hundred dollar set of balls for it in the seventies. With the table at home I could experiment. Already a circle track racer also, I was used to testing one thing at a time. I experimented with cue stick weights from very light to over two pounds. Very light, the arm has to do all of the work. With a lot of weight the cue ball seems to take off like a wild child. The neutral point seemed to be about 18 ounces, roughly three times the weight of a ball and a little over. Maybe some formula would show that, trial and error did. Cue ball weight times pi would be very close to neutral stick weight. I think coincidence but physics isn't my strong point.
Regardless of mass, an object can't transfer greater speed than it has unless there is flex and rebound during contact. The leather tip kills some of the speed, why superhard break tips are popular. The balls flex a little and snap back when hitting each other breaking and some other solid contacts. Do they do the same in the roughly 1/1000 of a second spent in contact with a comparatively soft playing cue tip? My thoughts are that this is doubtful.
A final observation: Bob Jewett and some others did some test hitting with instrumentation attached to a cue. I'm sure Bob recalls exactly what I am talking about. Last I knew dr dave had the results in an article on his site. I forget what they were testing at the moment, I have worked in R&D so I looked over the information to see if more could be gathered from it. Some nice graphs of the cue speed/velocity/acceleration at impact with the cue ball were generated. Haven't seen the article in years to remember what, acceleration I suspect. What interested me is that two testers used a pendulum stroke. The speed or acceleration fell off sharply when they contacted the cue ball. The third tester used a piston stroke. The graph at impact with the cue ball was quite a bit different indicating that the cue stick carried significantly more speed or acceleration through the cue ball although the graph showed a large drop with this stroke also.
While I agree that one-thousandths of a second isn't enough to take up all the give in a human hand and add any significant mass to the stick, the indication of the graphs is that something added mass. With everything else the same it would seem to have to be the hand/arm. This leads me to speculate that much of the give in the human hand has already been taken up with the inertia of the cue stick resisting forward acceleration. I would have liked to have seen more testing to determine what was going on but this wasn't what the testers were interested in, just what I noticed seeing the graphs later.
Hu
I had a home table when I was in my teens, junk granted but I bought a two hundred dollar set of balls for it in the seventies. With the table at home I could experiment. Already a circle track racer also, I was used to testing one thing at a time. I experimented with cue stick weights from very light to over two pounds. Very light, the arm has to do all of the work. With a lot of weight the cue ball seems to take off like a wild child. The neutral point seemed to be about 18 ounces, roughly three times the weight of a ball and a little over. Maybe some formula would show that, trial and error did. Cue ball weight times pi would be very close to neutral stick weight. I think coincidence but physics isn't my strong point.
Regardless of mass, an object can't transfer greater speed than it has unless there is flex and rebound during contact. The leather tip kills some of the speed, why superhard break tips are popular. The balls flex a little and snap back when hitting each other breaking and some other solid contacts. Do they do the same in the roughly 1/1000 of a second spent in contact with a comparatively soft playing cue tip? My thoughts are that this is doubtful.
A final observation: Bob Jewett and some others did some test hitting with instrumentation attached to a cue. I'm sure Bob recalls exactly what I am talking about. Last I knew dr dave had the results in an article on his site. I forget what they were testing at the moment, I have worked in R&D so I looked over the information to see if more could be gathered from it. Some nice graphs of the cue speed/velocity/acceleration at impact with the cue ball were generated. Haven't seen the article in years to remember what, acceleration I suspect. What interested me is that two testers used a pendulum stroke. The speed or acceleration fell off sharply when they contacted the cue ball. The third tester used a piston stroke. The graph at impact with the cue ball was quite a bit different indicating that the cue stick carried significantly more speed or acceleration through the cue ball although the graph showed a large drop with this stroke also.
While I agree that one-thousandths of a second isn't enough to take up all the give in a human hand and add any significant mass to the stick, the indication of the graphs is that something added mass. With everything else the same it would seem to have to be the hand/arm. This leads me to speculate that much of the give in the human hand has already been taken up with the inertia of the cue stick resisting forward acceleration. I would have liked to have seen more testing to determine what was going on but this wasn't what the testers were interested in, just what I noticed seeing the graphs later.
Hu
