The Obsolescence of Wood for Pool Cues
- Thread starter AtLarge
- Start date
Alternatives are worth checking because its no secret that environmental factors have led to many tree species just not growing as dense as they used to before pollution affected the atmosphere.
I think one of the qualities of wood that has kept it successful is that it's actually fairly elastic and compressible with a lower resonance frequency and that helps the tip "stick" just enough during that milisecond of contact that the rest of the cue's energy comes roughly in line with how you contact the ball in the first place. I think this may take some of the inconsistency out of non-center-ball hits. A more rigid shaft material would likely contribute some high-frequency tip vibration at the moment of contact that could encourage the tip to slip more readily when it contacts the ball.
However some tips are getting so elastic themselves that I think that composites may be able to be used more often for shafts.
Wood can flex quite far without deforming or breaking down over time, which is important in a cue. The one drawback wood has is that the wood fibers will swell with humidity and that affects the straightness and consistency of of the shaft. So what are the alternatives?
Amorphous metal
In addition to the already-attempted carbon-polymer composites (carbon fibre) I think another material to look into would be amorphous metal, possibly doped with carbon nanoparticles. Amorphous metals have been used in some other sporting equipment because unlike normal metals, they are very easy to mold into shape and are springy. Some baseball bats and even golf clubs incorporate amorphous metal. A hollow shaft made from a light amorphous metal and carbon composite could probably be made to flex like a wood shaft and always spring perfectly back straight, unlike traditional metals which can bend out of shape.
Wood-polymer-resin
A while back some guitar company I think in Finland was making acoustic guitars from what is essentially layers of thin wood flakes and fibers layered in a matt, then impregnated in polymer resin. This gives a resonance much like wood but does not swell with temperature and humidity changes.
Genetic engineering
This of course is expensive as all hell, but who knows, one day we may have stocks of wood that has been genetically engineered specifically to be perfect for pool cues! It may be possible to genetically modify a wood to be tight-grained and stable across temperature and humidity change, fine-tuned for the behavior we want out of a shaft.
Why stop there? Let's genetically modify some cows and pigs for perfect tip leather! Actually, some small projects have already started trying to lab-grow leather, and claim they can produce a much higher quality leather free from all scars and imperfections.
As we tinker with the genes, we might be able to get some very impressive qualities from lab-grown biomaterials to replace traditional plant and animal products.
Bamboo
Well if these solutions turn out to be no good, we could go ancient. Hard bamboo has been used as a building material for ages. Technically a grass rather than a wood, it actually can be harder than wood, and lighter. It is springy, durable, and is more resistant to moisture than most true wood. It has a much straighter grain pattern than maple, and when it does absorb humidity, it tends to swell length-wise along the straight grain, which should make shafts made from bamboo both radially consistent and highly resistant to warping.
Bamboo, being lighter than maple, may lend itself to excellent LD properties, but may require extra attention to weighting the cue at the joint to keep the cue from being very back-heavy.
I think one of the qualities of wood that has kept it successful is that it's actually fairly elastic and compressible with a lower resonance frequency and that helps the tip "stick" just enough during that milisecond of contact that the rest of the cue's energy comes roughly in line with how you contact the ball in the first place. I think this may take some of the inconsistency out of non-center-ball hits. A more rigid shaft material would likely contribute some high-frequency tip vibration at the moment of contact that could encourage the tip to slip more readily when it contacts the ball.
However some tips are getting so elastic themselves that I think that composites may be able to be used more often for shafts.
Wood can flex quite far without deforming or breaking down over time, which is important in a cue. The one drawback wood has is that the wood fibers will swell with humidity and that affects the straightness and consistency of of the shaft. So what are the alternatives?
Amorphous metal
In addition to the already-attempted carbon-polymer composites (carbon fibre) I think another material to look into would be amorphous metal, possibly doped with carbon nanoparticles. Amorphous metals have been used in some other sporting equipment because unlike normal metals, they are very easy to mold into shape and are springy. Some baseball bats and even golf clubs incorporate amorphous metal. A hollow shaft made from a light amorphous metal and carbon composite could probably be made to flex like a wood shaft and always spring perfectly back straight, unlike traditional metals which can bend out of shape.
Wood-polymer-resin
A while back some guitar company I think in Finland was making acoustic guitars from what is essentially layers of thin wood flakes and fibers layered in a matt, then impregnated in polymer resin. This gives a resonance much like wood but does not swell with temperature and humidity changes.
Genetic engineering
This of course is expensive as all hell, but who knows, one day we may have stocks of wood that has been genetically engineered specifically to be perfect for pool cues! It may be possible to genetically modify a wood to be tight-grained and stable across temperature and humidity change, fine-tuned for the behavior we want out of a shaft.
Why stop there? Let's genetically modify some cows and pigs for perfect tip leather! Actually, some small projects have already started trying to lab-grow leather, and claim they can produce a much higher quality leather free from all scars and imperfections.
As we tinker with the genes, we might be able to get some very impressive qualities from lab-grown biomaterials to replace traditional plant and animal products.
Bamboo
Well if these solutions turn out to be no good, we could go ancient. Hard bamboo has been used as a building material for ages. Technically a grass rather than a wood, it actually can be harder than wood, and lighter. It is springy, durable, and is more resistant to moisture than most true wood. It has a much straighter grain pattern than maple, and when it does absorb humidity, it tends to swell length-wise along the straight grain, which should make shafts made from bamboo both radially consistent and highly resistant to warping.
Bamboo, being lighter than maple, may lend itself to excellent LD properties, but may require extra attention to weighting the cue at the joint to keep the cue from being very back-heavy.
Last edited:
Even with the current population of the planet, the number of forests and trees has been shrinking, meaning we are using wood faster than it is growing, or to put it another way, the earth cannot indefinitely support the wood needs of the current population. And as the population of the world continues to increase the supply of wood will continue to decrease even faster. Alternative materials to woods will have to be developed and used for most things at some point simply because there won't be enough wood to meet the demand at some point (along with wood becoming prohibitively expensive for most applications along the way due to the short supply). The only real question is just how long until wood is prohibitively expensive or where there is simply not enough at any price.
Last edited:
Careful with the Maple Syrup thing, it is my understanding that much of the Maple Syrup out there is not actually Maple Syrup but some Maple flavored corn syrup .
I'm sure he was talking about real maple syrup. Canadians and New Englanders know the difference just by touch.
Last edited:
Read the poll
There is another thread going called average age of AZB members .
The younger generations are also the lowest membership age brackets.
50 years from now pool most likely will not exist.
A large amount of the younger generation doesnt play pool like we did because of electronic games ...
There is another thread going called average age of AZB members .
The younger generations are also the lowest membership age brackets.
50 years from now pool most likely will not exist.
A large amount of the younger generation doesnt play pool like we did because of electronic games ...
Last edited:
I like the Idea of Bamboo ferrules??? Anyone ever make any of those??? Would love to try them out!
http://forums.azbilliards.com/showthread.php?t=268145
found it pretty cool. I want one!
KD
Last edited:
I think you are slightly missing the point...
First of wood is a great material for cues, and other materials are allready being used, like plastic, phenolic, carbon fibre etc.
Some cues (usually cheap one) use plastics throughout their cues. Graphite and carbon fibre for shafts have been around for a long time.
The use of wood it the butt part of the cue serves many purposes.
- you can adjust for weight, tone etc
- you can dial the hit in, by using the right woods
And most importantly you can make a pretty example of functional art.
Last edited:
This is how I feel about....wood is a miracle substance.....violin lovers need 'tone'.
....trying to replace wood is like re-inventing the wheel.
The same thing goes for slate on a pool table....talk has been about replacing slate...
...but one of the miracle things about slate is that it is porous...moisture is absorbed by
slate....otherwise, after a table is sitting all night, the cloth would be wet from humidity.
...and wood is a renewable resource
Tennis rackets, golf clubs, fly and spin rods have gone over to carbon fiber. Even some large format (film) cameras are being made with carbon fiber.
I'm a geezer so I think my 8X10 mahogany Deardorff is the pinnacle of large format camera design. Since kids today have no idea of what film is or that cameras can be made of wood, I see the carbon fiber shaft/cue in the future, if pool is still with us.
It's what you grow up with. That's why I have a Gold Crown in the basement. Young guys or really good players like Diamond.
The five year old today will laugh at all you old coots clinging to your wood sticks, twenty years from now. The twenty year olds today laugh at me humping a 13 pound camera, film packs, light meter and tripod.
I'm a geezer so I think my 8X10 mahogany Deardorff is the pinnacle of large format camera design. Since kids today have no idea of what film is or that cameras can be made of wood, I see the carbon fiber shaft/cue in the future, if pool is still with us.
It's what you grow up with. That's why I have a Gold Crown in the basement. Young guys or really good players like Diamond.
The five year old today will laugh at all you old coots clinging to your wood sticks, twenty years from now. The twenty year olds today laugh at me humping a 13 pound camera, film packs, light meter and tripod.
Sounds strangely familiar. Rub it. Grow. Wet. shrivel. What were you watching again???
Yes, I am aware of all that (as I was 7 years ago when I started the thread). The point of the thread was simply to discuss people's thoughts on the future of wood as a material for cues. I'd guess you feel it will be used far into the future.
Actually that part does not surprise me at all. I assume they have a large profit margin on the butts by keeping the material costs down and using mass production methods. Making a butt out of actual carbon fiber would be much more expensive for them.
Predator sell a lot of cues that appear to be mostly surface design and very little of what traditionally makes a cue expensive (other than just the name of the cue maker) namely high-quality wood and complex, well detailed inlay designs. One of the unseen things you pay for from a traditional cue maker is all the wood they rejected during the process of making the cue.
For a lot of their cues they don't even both listing what kind of wood the butt is made of. (E.G. The P2 Racer2 which is some kind of white plastic coated over who knows what with an RRP of nearly $1,000!)
As I noted back in 2009, using high-tech composite material like carbon fiber requires a whole different set of manufacturing techniques and expensive tooling that has to be done up front. It does not surprise me at all they are limiting the first production run to be sold only with their most expensive butts as this will maximize their profit and allow them to offset the tooling costs to get geared up for mass production. Alternatively their manufacturing technique may be very labor intensive by design and they simply cannot make that many of them, which again would lead them to sell them only on the most expensive butt they can.
Man made materials
In the year 2525 Zager and Evans
https://www.bing.com/search?q=in+th...47174451fb7ca7b4ca2f4d156&pq=in the year 2525
In the year 2525 Zager and Evans
https://www.bing.com/search?q=in+th...47174451fb7ca7b4ca2f4d156&pq=in the year 2525
My worthless opinion
In golf, tennis, etc there was a move from wood to metal and composites. They made real and material differences in the game. You simply cannot play competitively with wooden equipment.
The same won't happen with pool because the most advanced cue technology doesn't really change anything. Yeah, it can make it easier to aim, depending how you approach it (I personally don't like LD shafts...hard to change after 30 years), but it doesn't make you aim BETTER. Break cues/tips are nice to have, but it's not a game changing advantage.
With advanced golf equipment, I can hit the ball MUCH further. Different animal. Some courses are not even really possible to play properly without modern equipment anymore.
In golf, tennis, etc there was a move from wood to metal and composites. They made real and material differences in the game. You simply cannot play competitively with wooden equipment.
The same won't happen with pool because the most advanced cue technology doesn't really change anything. Yeah, it can make it easier to aim, depending how you approach it (I personally don't like LD shafts...hard to change after 30 years), but it doesn't make you aim BETTER. Break cues/tips are nice to have, but it's not a game changing advantage.
With advanced golf equipment, I can hit the ball MUCH further. Different animal. Some courses are not even really possible to play properly without modern equipment anymore.
Kathy Keegan
Registered
Having used both, I much prefer wood. I have a composite cue now. It's OK. The custom tulip wood and rosewood butt cue stolen from me several years ago was superior in hit to the beat up composite thing I have now, but I can shoot with the thing anyway. Can't look a gift horse in the mouth.
Oh, anyone seeing a cue with no points, tulip front of butt, rosewood base, and my name implanted in the bottom of the butt on one side and cue maker's on the other, it belongs to me. Not whoever is using it. Stolen about 4 years ago.
Oh, anyone seeing a cue with no points, tulip front of butt, rosewood base, and my name implanted in the bottom of the butt on one side and cue maker's on the other, it belongs to me. Not whoever is using it. Stolen about 4 years ago.
Kathy,
Comparing the Predator Revo to any composite shaft made prior is like comparing the model T to an S550 Mercedes they are both cars but it ends there.
It won't be long before custom cue makers figure out how to adjust/re-work the Revo shaft to play with as much deflection as the customer wants, all while keeping the dent proof qualities, ease of cleaning, and near perfect straightness intact.
Cocoa
nah nah… something will come along, the fundamentals of billiards has
a natural draw for those wanting a challenge, risk and reward.