This long ago written post by a true genius and master cuemaker is relevant to a lot of topics being discussed recently. It is my gift to many of you to repost it here:
The orginal post and surrounding discussions can be found here http://groups.google.com/group/rec....efe2ca39bb5?lnk=gst&q=rosabelle+believe&pli=1
Rosabelle Believe by Thomas Wayne
Deflection/Squirt and the Predator shaft phenomenon explained:
First a bit of history...
My first experiments with loaded shafts came about for the same reasons as
many other cuemakers: the search for better performance. Yes, that's right,
the brass weighted ferrule (I tried steel) is OLD news. Many before me, and
many after me have played with it, all obtaining the same results. I won't
bore you with the physics involved (though believe me, I could), but the
massive sideways cueball movement caused by a weighted ferrule proves
conclusively that greater tip mass produces less shaft DEFLECTION (correct
use of term; see B. Stroud definitions) and correspondingly greater cueball
deflection, which we lovingly call "SQUIRT". This discovery prompted the
question: What happens if we REDUCE the mass at the tip of the shaft (I have
coined the descriptive phrase "negative loaded ferrule")? The answer to
this helped me solve another problem (actually two problems) I was having
with Ivory ferrules.
Because the winters in Alaska are so dry, Ivory ferrules tended to crack
uncontrollably. After much experimentation, I discovered that replacing the
standard maple tenon inside the ferrule with a softer wood allowed the Ivory
to shrink around the tenon -compressing it slightly- without cracking the
ferrule. This in turn led to another interesting discovery. Ivory ferrules
weigh approximately 25% more than phenolic ferrules and, as I already knew,
this causes them to exhibit more squirt. Lo and behold, the softer tenon
also weighs substantially less than a maple tenon, and this factor
eliminated the increase in squirt caused by the heavier Ivory ferrule. The
softer wood I use is Alaskan Yellow Cedar, which as strong longitudinally as
maple, but weighs almost as little as Balsa. Plus it exhibits the least
tendency to warp of any wood I have ever seen.
Fast forward to the early nineties. Alan Clawson approached me at a
tournament in Philadelphia to show me the new innovation he was involved
with: the Predator shaft/ferrule system. At that time, they wanted to
interest other cuemakers in buying laminated shafts from their company. In
the original illustrations he showed me, the ferrule tenon was drawn as a
SOLID phenolic rod. Of course, in production, the Predator ferrule tenon is
actually a thin walled HOLLOW phenolic tube extending about 2 to 3 inches
into the shaft. To this day, I don't know if the diagram I was shown was a
"smoke screen", or if they had intended to originally use solid rod. Based
on my understanding that it was to be solid, I knew I wasn't interested
(phenolic weighs much more than maple), so I passed. Incidentally, the idea
of a laminated shaft is as old as the hills; most of us have experimented
with it at one time or another. In fact, I have been told by a number of
other long-time cuemakers that George Balabushka experimented with laminated
shafts in the sixties! As an interesting bit of trivia, the Predator shaft
is NOT patented (I don't believe it can be); the only patent of record for a
laminated shaft is co-held by Colorado cuemaker Dave Kikel. Nor have I been
able to find any recorded patent for the Predator ferrule system. Of
course, if any cuemaker wants to achieve results similar to the Predator,
all he has to do is run a Yellow Cedar tenon approx. 3 inches into the
business end of a shaft and use an additional 3/4 inch or so for the ferrule
tenon.
So, now you know just as much as I do about the Predator shaft (well, maybe
not quite as much), but we still haven't answered two key questions: 1)
Why does the shaft with lower tip-mass (negative loaded) squirt less? And
2) Should we really care so much about this great spawn-of-Satan: SQUIRT?
Why lower tip mass reduces squirt if easy: the equal-and-opposite-reaction
principle factors in relative mass. Lets ignore, for a moment, the major
linear forces involved in driving the cueball down the table, and just focus
on the peripheral forces caused by an off-center hit. And, for the purpose
of illustration, lets liken that action to one of hitting a round ball with
a hammer- sort of like a croquet mallet. If it's a tennis ball and a sledge
hammer, the ball is gonna zoom with very little effect on the sledge. But
if it's a tack hammer versus a bowling ball, well, I hope you get the
picture. (Go ahead and talk among yourselves a bit, if you need.) The
lower mass shaft tip is more easily moved aside- NOT flexed or bent, simply
shifted- by the cueball, resulting in what? Less squirt!
But is this result good? Do we really want less squirt, do we need less
squirt? ("...You want me on that wall, you NEED me on that wall!" Jack
Nicholson in *A Few Good Men*) Allow me to draw an analogy that relates to
my own profession... Every metal lathe in my shop has a dial attached to the
crank handles on the cross-slides. These dials are calibrated with index
marks that indicate each increment of travel occurring during the use of the
crank handle. So, by paying attention to these dials, I can monitor and
control the travel of the cross-slide (and therefore the cutting tool) to an
accuracy of 1/2 of one thousandth of an inch! If I really wanted control, I
could fit these cranks with dials twice as big, with twice as many
graduations. What I actually have done is equip each lathe with electronic
digital readouts which are accurate to 100 times the cross-slide dials.
This gives me LOTS of fine-tune adjustment. Now suppose instead I put
little bitty dials with just a few graduations on my cross-slides. Boy, I
sure wouldn't have much range of control, now would I? Have you noticed how
the Predator fans have praised the small amount of english required to
achieve dramatic results? Wow! I just hope you always are applying the
english exactly the way you want it. After all, the cue doesn't know
whether you executed the shot correctly, it just blindly performs as you
direct it to. I don't think anyone would disagree that any cue that
enhances and amplifies good execution can just as easily enhance and amplify
BAD execution. If the car you drive is typical, it requires 2 1/2
revolutions of the steering wheel to turn the tightest radius possible for
that particular make/model. But certainly Detroit has the technology to
equip your car with a steering mechanism which could crank the front wheels
"lock-to-lock" with just a quarter turn of the steering wheel. Would you
like that? Huh, would ya? I didn't think so.
Squirt exists. Every top player has learned to work with and around it. If
you believe that your game will be better with a "squirtless" cue, buy a
Predator. Or ask your favorite cuemaker to make you a low-mass-tip
(negative loaded) shaft. If he didn't know how before (no shame in that,
very few do) he certainly will after he reads this article. Just don't
blame me if your higher highs come with some lower lows. My friend Bill,
the mountain biker, loves to buy the latest in titanium seat-post bolts- at
$60 a pop- so he can shave 1/3 ounce off his bike. My suggestion of passing
up lunch to shave 1/3 ounce off his ass seems to fall on deaf ears. As my
water-skiing training partner, Bob, loves to say (about new, 'improved'
equipment): "Everybody wants to BUY a better turn". My advice, as someone
who really does know a little something about pool cues and about physics,
is: focus on improving your game, too. Achieve skill and understanding in
pool the same way you get to Carnegie Hall (ask any musician).
TW
The orginal post and surrounding discussions can be found here http://groups.google.com/group/rec....efe2ca39bb5?lnk=gst&q=rosabelle+believe&pli=1
Rosabelle Believe by Thomas Wayne
Deflection/Squirt and the Predator shaft phenomenon explained:
First a bit of history...
My first experiments with loaded shafts came about for the same reasons as
many other cuemakers: the search for better performance. Yes, that's right,
the brass weighted ferrule (I tried steel) is OLD news. Many before me, and
many after me have played with it, all obtaining the same results. I won't
bore you with the physics involved (though believe me, I could), but the
massive sideways cueball movement caused by a weighted ferrule proves
conclusively that greater tip mass produces less shaft DEFLECTION (correct
use of term; see B. Stroud definitions) and correspondingly greater cueball
deflection, which we lovingly call "SQUIRT". This discovery prompted the
question: What happens if we REDUCE the mass at the tip of the shaft (I have
coined the descriptive phrase "negative loaded ferrule")? The answer to
this helped me solve another problem (actually two problems) I was having
with Ivory ferrules.
Because the winters in Alaska are so dry, Ivory ferrules tended to crack
uncontrollably. After much experimentation, I discovered that replacing the
standard maple tenon inside the ferrule with a softer wood allowed the Ivory
to shrink around the tenon -compressing it slightly- without cracking the
ferrule. This in turn led to another interesting discovery. Ivory ferrules
weigh approximately 25% more than phenolic ferrules and, as I already knew,
this causes them to exhibit more squirt. Lo and behold, the softer tenon
also weighs substantially less than a maple tenon, and this factor
eliminated the increase in squirt caused by the heavier Ivory ferrule. The
softer wood I use is Alaskan Yellow Cedar, which as strong longitudinally as
maple, but weighs almost as little as Balsa. Plus it exhibits the least
tendency to warp of any wood I have ever seen.
Fast forward to the early nineties. Alan Clawson approached me at a
tournament in Philadelphia to show me the new innovation he was involved
with: the Predator shaft/ferrule system. At that time, they wanted to
interest other cuemakers in buying laminated shafts from their company. In
the original illustrations he showed me, the ferrule tenon was drawn as a
SOLID phenolic rod. Of course, in production, the Predator ferrule tenon is
actually a thin walled HOLLOW phenolic tube extending about 2 to 3 inches
into the shaft. To this day, I don't know if the diagram I was shown was a
"smoke screen", or if they had intended to originally use solid rod. Based
on my understanding that it was to be solid, I knew I wasn't interested
(phenolic weighs much more than maple), so I passed. Incidentally, the idea
of a laminated shaft is as old as the hills; most of us have experimented
with it at one time or another. In fact, I have been told by a number of
other long-time cuemakers that George Balabushka experimented with laminated
shafts in the sixties! As an interesting bit of trivia, the Predator shaft
is NOT patented (I don't believe it can be); the only patent of record for a
laminated shaft is co-held by Colorado cuemaker Dave Kikel. Nor have I been
able to find any recorded patent for the Predator ferrule system. Of
course, if any cuemaker wants to achieve results similar to the Predator,
all he has to do is run a Yellow Cedar tenon approx. 3 inches into the
business end of a shaft and use an additional 3/4 inch or so for the ferrule
tenon.
So, now you know just as much as I do about the Predator shaft (well, maybe
not quite as much), but we still haven't answered two key questions: 1)
Why does the shaft with lower tip-mass (negative loaded) squirt less? And
2) Should we really care so much about this great spawn-of-Satan: SQUIRT?
Why lower tip mass reduces squirt if easy: the equal-and-opposite-reaction
principle factors in relative mass. Lets ignore, for a moment, the major
linear forces involved in driving the cueball down the table, and just focus
on the peripheral forces caused by an off-center hit. And, for the purpose
of illustration, lets liken that action to one of hitting a round ball with
a hammer- sort of like a croquet mallet. If it's a tennis ball and a sledge
hammer, the ball is gonna zoom with very little effect on the sledge. But
if it's a tack hammer versus a bowling ball, well, I hope you get the
picture. (Go ahead and talk among yourselves a bit, if you need.) The
lower mass shaft tip is more easily moved aside- NOT flexed or bent, simply
shifted- by the cueball, resulting in what? Less squirt!
But is this result good? Do we really want less squirt, do we need less
squirt? ("...You want me on that wall, you NEED me on that wall!" Jack
Nicholson in *A Few Good Men*) Allow me to draw an analogy that relates to
my own profession... Every metal lathe in my shop has a dial attached to the
crank handles on the cross-slides. These dials are calibrated with index
marks that indicate each increment of travel occurring during the use of the
crank handle. So, by paying attention to these dials, I can monitor and
control the travel of the cross-slide (and therefore the cutting tool) to an
accuracy of 1/2 of one thousandth of an inch! If I really wanted control, I
could fit these cranks with dials twice as big, with twice as many
graduations. What I actually have done is equip each lathe with electronic
digital readouts which are accurate to 100 times the cross-slide dials.
This gives me LOTS of fine-tune adjustment. Now suppose instead I put
little bitty dials with just a few graduations on my cross-slides. Boy, I
sure wouldn't have much range of control, now would I? Have you noticed how
the Predator fans have praised the small amount of english required to
achieve dramatic results? Wow! I just hope you always are applying the
english exactly the way you want it. After all, the cue doesn't know
whether you executed the shot correctly, it just blindly performs as you
direct it to. I don't think anyone would disagree that any cue that
enhances and amplifies good execution can just as easily enhance and amplify
BAD execution. If the car you drive is typical, it requires 2 1/2
revolutions of the steering wheel to turn the tightest radius possible for
that particular make/model. But certainly Detroit has the technology to
equip your car with a steering mechanism which could crank the front wheels
"lock-to-lock" with just a quarter turn of the steering wheel. Would you
like that? Huh, would ya? I didn't think so.
Squirt exists. Every top player has learned to work with and around it. If
you believe that your game will be better with a "squirtless" cue, buy a
Predator. Or ask your favorite cuemaker to make you a low-mass-tip
(negative loaded) shaft. If he didn't know how before (no shame in that,
very few do) he certainly will after he reads this article. Just don't
blame me if your higher highs come with some lower lows. My friend Bill,
the mountain biker, loves to buy the latest in titanium seat-post bolts- at
$60 a pop- so he can shave 1/3 ounce off his bike. My suggestion of passing
up lunch to shave 1/3 ounce off his ass seems to fall on deaf ears. As my
water-skiing training partner, Bob, loves to say (about new, 'improved'
equipment): "Everybody wants to BUY a better turn". My advice, as someone
who really does know a little something about pool cues and about physics,
is: focus on improving your game, too. Achieve skill and understanding in
pool the same way you get to Carnegie Hall (ask any musician).
TW
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