Low Deflection Shafts?
- Thread starter azsportpilot
- Start date
I have shot with standard maple shafts as well as ob, Jacoby hybrid, and predator shafts. Feel wise my favorites are the Jacoby and ob. To me the new ob plus shafts hit fantastic and don't feel that different than a standard maple shaft. There is definitely less squirt from LD shafts. That can easily be seen when you shoot with them. To me, for a new player, you'd wanna cut down the number of variables when you're learning and going LD should allow your aiming to be a little easier since you're not accounting for squirt as much. Ob also offers the most options as far as feel and performance goes (ob 1, 2, classic, and pro). Different tapers and ferrules. Try to find some and hit with a few if at all possible before you decide on one. In the end its all preference not fact.
Pivoting at your shaft's non-swerve ("natural") pivot point only compensates accurately for squirt on non-swerve shots.
Problem is most side spin shots do involve some swerve - and worse yet, the amount of swerve varies from shot to shot, so your shaft's "pivot point for this shot" ("effective" pivot point) also varies from shot to shot.
You can get in the habit of using a speed and tip offset that more or less balances squirt and swerve, but I believe it's easier to learn to accurately adjust your aim than your speed and tip offset, and you get a wider range of CB control.
pj
chgo
There are lots of facts about squirt and LD shafts, many of them mentioned in this thread and the rest explained at Dr. Dave's website. Your preference should take them into account.
pj
chgo
RBC
Deceased
Dave
I don't have any worries about how to get an accurate test. That's not the issue.
The issue is that with any kind of testing done by each manufacturer, the results will always be considered suspect. Especially if all of the manufacturers have test results that show there's is the best. It's like the Dyson versus Shark vacuum cleaner commercials. Both show their's is better. I don't think either is wrong, but the tests are chosen to support their product.
By documenting a real measurable thing it takes out the doubt.
Royce
RBC
Deceased
Dave
Actually, I don't think it's really that hard.
I know that, using solid modeling, I can draw up the actual dimensions of the shaft in question including all ferrules, hardware, inside machining, etc., and calculate the end mass of any section or length I choose. This would be more representative of the average than of a specific item, but it would be pretty close. The biggest variable would be the density of the maple itself.
Also, it's not too hard buy shafts, section them off at an accurately measured 6" from the tip, and weight them. Then shorten it to 5" from the tip, and weigh it again. Then 4" and so on. Of course, you'd probably want to do this to several of each one so you can get an average number. It would be expensive, but I think paying for it would be the toughest part.
Royce
I don't think that just because a shaft deflects less than any other means it's a better shaft.
For a long time I was aiming to the left and moving my swing to the right, always used a regular shaft. Once I started to aim better without as much of a swerve to my stroke, I started to have issues pocketing balls with spin, so I went to a Players HXT. Then a friend of mine helped me a bit to straighten out my stoke even more so now I can spin the ball better than ever, BUT I now was missing balls again even with the Players LD shaft. I tried my son's OB1 shaft, and I found my ball pocketing with my new way of standing and aligning my arm and head worked really well with the OB1.
So it's not just "what is the best LD shaft" based on how little it will push a cueball off center with spin, it really needs to be "what is the best LD shaft for how I shoot". Anything else is just suggestions to try different brands to test, and can't possibly just be "buy this shaft, it's better" because chances are it won't help any other person the same way it did the person suggesting that shaft.
We can have all the tests that show that shaft A deflects .2 inches less over 6 feet than shaft B, and it still won't help us made a selection without playing with it, because the amount of deflection does not matter at all once you take the personal play style into consideration. It's like saying one car is better because it has more horsepower, there are 40 other things that you need to look at aside from just some raw specification number.
Last edited:
Per my squirt/deflection/stiffness resource page, I recommend "low cue ball deflection" ... or even better, "low squirt."
Regards,
Dave
Actually, the high-speed video part is a better job for SloMoHolic ... he has a much better camera than the one to which I used to have access (but no longer do). I'll send him a PM.
If he does the filming, I'll do the interpreting.
Regards,
Dave
Royce,
That's an easy way to calculate the "mass of the end of the shaft," but that's not the same as the effective "endmass" of the shaft. See the article (Diagram 4) and resource page for more info.
Actually, density/weight changes in the stuff (tip, ferrule, maple) closest to the tip can have a much greater effect than the maple farther from the tip. Again, see the article and resource page.
Best regards,
Dave
Ron Swanson
Banned
Get a room already. You two are as bad as the curtain botherer and his merry band of sycophants.
Anyway, you can't jump with a z2 because - get this - different shafts give different results, just like different tips do, and different shaft sizes do, and different tip curvatures do, and different materials do, and different...zzzzzzzzzzzz.
The "you have to compensate anyways" argument comes up a lot and is rarely addressed properly. In order to understand the advantage of less squirt, you need to consider that there is always some error involved in compensating for squirt and in striking the cue ball. If the overall range of squirt is less, that also means that the variation in squirt due to error is less, so a low-squirt shaft will tolerate more error before the uncompensated squirt will be enough to cause you to miss the shot. In other words, a shaft that produces less squirt is more forgiving of aim and stroke errors as well as requiring less compensation.
As an example, say I intend to shoot a hard, center ball shot and line up the shot perfectly. With a low squirt shaft, I will be able to miss the center of the cue ball (my intended target) by more before the resulting squirt will cause me to miss pocketing the object ball.
If you mean a smaller aim correction means smaller aiming errors, I agree - aim small, miss small. It's like a stronger or weaker crosswind for an archer - of course you'd rather have it weaker. However, the better auto-squirt-correction of higher squirt shafts (see below) is an offsetting advantage that complicates the equation.
As much as I wish this was true, I disagree with this part. Unfortunately, low squirt shafts are less forgiving of stroke errors, not more forgiving.
A stroke error is like applying backhand English: it works best for higher squirt shafts because their squirt pivot points are closer to a typical bridge length - pivoting at a typical bridge length with a higher squirt shaft might compensate pretty well for squirt, maybe even perfectly. But pivoting at a typical bridge length with a low squirt shaft will always overcorrect for squirt.
pj
chgo
Last edited:
PJ,
I don't think LD shaft natural pivot lengths are as long as you think they are, or maybe you prefer a really short bridge length. I use a Predator Z-2 shaft with a bridge length of about 14 inches, and back-hand English (BHE) works great for me with short and/or fast-speed shots. For long and slow shots (especially with follow), I use front-hand english (FHE) and combinations of FHE and BHE where appropriate.
Regards,
Dave
My idea of what's typical could be skewed by my short bridge length and my very-low squirt cue. On the other hand, I think yours is a relatively long bridge - and the effective pivot point for most shots is longer too.
But either way you make an important point: even a good generality doesn't cover all cases, and it's best to consider your own bridge length, pivot point and even style of play.
pj
chgo
Good point. I agree that a shaft with a pivot point very close to your typical bridge length will automatically compensate for stroke errors due to your grip hand moving off-line. The type of error I was thinking of in my example was one where the entire cue was shifted parallel to the intended line, so I should have called it a setup error. Fortunately for me, my normal bridge is very near the pivot point of my WD700 shaft (determined by experimentation), so I guess I get the best of both worlds: low squirt to reduce the effect of my poor bridge placement and a natural pivot point near my usual bridge length to help counteract my crappy stroke. :smile:
Last edited:
Agreed. As Matt and others have pointed out, an LD shaft offers advantages with:
1.) minimizing errors due to slight off-center alignment
2.) providing automatic stroke-error correction
3.) allowing for BHE squirt compensation
2 and 3 apply only if the bridge length is well matched to the natural pivot length of the cue.
Regards,
Dave
I have tried 4 popular brands of LD shafts so far, do they all vibrate when using a lot of side spin? Is the vibration less noticeable with some brands? I wont mention which 4 I have used, I am not trying to call any specific manufacturer out here, I suspect they probably all vibrate much more so than a solid Maple shaft due to the nature of the design. Thank you.