cueman said:
Here is probably what you were refering to:
Shaft Turning Tips
When you get your shaft wood, take each shaft dowel out and look it over before preparing it to be turned. First, look at the shaft’s appearance to decide which end you would rather have as the tip end. You might want to put the prettiest end of the shaft as the tip end. As you get experience at turning shafts, you should be able to judge if a brown sugar line that is only a few grain lines in from the edge will cut out or not if left at the tip/smaller end of the shaft. If it will cut out, then in this case it is better to put the prettiest end toward the joint end.
If all dowels are perfectly straight, then you can stick them through your headstock and center drill them dead in the middle on both ends. Shaft dowels will usually have some warp to them. If they have very much warp at all to them, you will want to move the center hole on the tip end over a little to get the center of the shaft turning true. Moving the center hole toward the high side of the warp about 1/10 of an inch will usually take care of it. This can be marked with calipers and center drilled off center with a hand drill. If you have a double chuck headstock lathe, like the Deluxe Cue Smith, you can center drill the joint end with only one or so inches sticking out and then turn the shaft around and leave 12 to 14 inches sticking out and center drill it with the tip end flopping around. This will put your center hole right where it needs to be. Now your shaft will turn true in the middle much sooner in the turning process and produce many more straight shafts.
Chris
www.cuesmith.com
www.internationalcuemakers.com
Sorry, but I don't agree with the author of "Shaft Turning Tips".
A sugar line should not be a decider wich end of the dowel to choose for the tip end.
A sugar line is nothing but natural sap wich has burned while turning the wood in dowel shape.
And just centering a dowel is not the right method of choosing where the centerpoints of the dowel should be...
One of the most common methods and probably the best way to decide wich end to use for the tip end, is just to look at the growth lines and make sure the lines run as straight as possible through the whole length of the finished shaft.
Sometimes it means that you will have to drill the centerhole (centerpoint) off-center in the dowel and compensate that by thus turning of more wood on one side of the dowel than the other.
Cuemakers have done this for ages and turned up with "straight grained" shafts which stay straight over the years.
Balabushka, Szamboti, Tascarella, Black, Searing, South West, Hercek don't look at tiny sugar lines or the number of growth rings. Some of their shafts have 6 growth rings, others 20...But their shafts are being considered to be the very best.
They select shaftwood with the thought that it will one day be a round piece of wood and they'll look for straight grained pieces from the beginning. Then they take passes which take 1 year upto 4 years to make the final cut.
Precision, passion and patience are their keys to succes, not esthetics or speed.
Tom Penrose
I have a mess of 1" shaft blank dowels that I'm ready to begin turning down 50 thousands at a time on a shaft taper machine on my Delta table saw. My question to you is this; many of the shaft blanks have 24 or so rings to the inch at one end and about 16 on the other end. There is virtually no run off in grain going off center. I hate to ask a lame question, but I am wondering which ring count end most builders prefer to have at the joint area, the higher ring count, or the lower ring count?? Is it better to have the most ring count toward the ferrule end so it doesn't warp? And lastly what is your reasoning for placing the higher/lower ring end in either direction? All things considered, is there a difference? Is grain density a factor? What about weight?
