Hello....
I hope my experience in this realm might be of some assistance in your endeavor. Tony Sciannella, his son, Tony Jr., his brother Ray and I (my name is Vince Sangmeister) built Black Boar cues from scratch. We started with a vacant building suited for 220/3phase and nothing more. Making money in the business is so damn sketchy at best. You have to ask yourself how much machinist experience you have. Not woodworking!!! Machinist...steel, aluminum, various other alloys, plastics, phenolics, drills, end mills of every kind, HSS cutters, routers, saws, etc.
The reason I say this is several fold. First, 99.9% of the "tools" you'll need are not off the shelf items. Everything we did, every jig and fixture was made by us. We purchased metal working lathes and mills and retrofitted everything. Basically we gutted each machine and and rebuilt it from scratch. Effectively we were purchasing nothing more than a motor and good ways on the lathe or mill. Metal working requires bull force for the most part, low RPM/High Torque....wood, does not. The metal working machines were capable of holding the tolerances we were looking for + or - 1/2 of .001" on wood. To give you some idea of how tight a tolerance that is...a human hair is approximately .002" in diameter. Take that hair, split it in half down the middle for .001" and then split each of those halves down the middle. We developed machines capable of doing that repeatedly. For the most part and from my experience you can't hold tolerances like that with wood working equipment. The metal working machines were too torquey (in a word) for the high speed cutting wood demanded. You simply can't take a 30+" maple shaft and butt a HSS cutting tool up against it while it's spinning at 3000rpm. A router motor spinning at 30,000 rpm, jigged to a metal working tool holder on a lathe and spinning a razor sharp slotting cutter CAN cut that piece of maple to high tolerance.
The second reason I say you should know some things about being a machinist is that you have to learn about tolerances. Most "woodworkers" that is, those who do cabinetry or wood lathe turnings etc don't use such high tolerances as you will with building cues. For example....a 13mm shaft in inches is .5125" Most cue makers aim at .511 to .513 A better player can most definitely feel the difference of .001" as that shaft slides through his/her fingers. Not that I'm a "better" player but to give you an example of this...I once turned 7 shafts to final size using only sandpaper. I didn't put a mic to a single one of them as I sanded off the remaining .008" or so. The only "micrometer" I used was running the shaft through my closed bridge fingers. After I felt the shaft was at 12-3/4mm I stopped sanding that particular one and moved to the next. After all 7 shafts were where I thought they should be I put a mic to them. Over the 7 shafts the difference was less than 1/4 of a thousandth of an inch. And that was by touch alone. This endeavor is most definitely NOT woodworking by any stretch of the imagination.
Cue makers become "experts" in every facet of machinery, mechanical properties of wood as an engineering material, wood selection, relative humidity, moisture content, adhesives, finishes,....the list is endless depending on how indepth you wish to pursue this.
I think the greatest expenses you're going to incur are in QUALITY materials, machines, materials for retrofitting those machines to turn wood at high tolerances, and the most important expense you're going to incur is TIME!! It takes a long time to learn all those things effectively. I highly recommend you dabble at the repair aspect of cues first. The reason being is that by doing so you'll get to see every convolution of cue that's almost ever been made. The good, the bad and the really really really really bad. When that little old lady of a customer comes in with the K-Mart ramin wood shafted, brass jointed, nylon wrapped, 42 piece cue and she wants you to "make it play better because she can't draw her ball more than 2 inches" on a bar box, you'll also learn a ton about customer service. You'll also get the opportunity to tinker and experiment with woods, tips, metal, precious metals, inlay materials, wrap materials, adhesives, finishes, as well as be able to identify ALL those things in someone elses product. Personally I think if someone wants a cue restored back to it's original condition you should know how it was made and not too many cuemakers are coming off the secrets of their success. That education, knowing how it's been done in the past, will be your most valuable lesson. Rhetorically speaking here but do you really want to build the same cue that's been built for the last 30 years??? Or, would you desire to do something different and better than it's been done in the past??? Again, personal observation here but it's entirely more fun to "build a better mouse trap."
If I can be of any help whatsoever please do not hesitate to contact me at any time. My email is
vncntsng@cablelynx.com
Sincerely, Vince Sangmeister
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