Blue Book Entry on Joss....
Based on this, your cue is a "post-split" as it dates from the 80's, although it's still 25 years old....
"Dan Janes was running one of the top pool halls in Baltimore, Maryland in the mid-1960s. When road players came to Baltimore, he was the man to see to set up games. One of these road players was Bill Stroud. The two became friends, and before long, the two were on the road together. They spent three years traveling the country during warm weather seasons playing pool and selling cues. They found that good cues were very easy to sell, but very hard to come by. They believed that George Balabushka made the best playing cues, and he could not make them fast enough to keep up with the demand. Dan and Bill knew that there was an open market for great playing cues, and as players, they thought they were best suited to make them.
Tired of life on the road, in 1968, Dan and Bill set up shop in a two-car garage in Baltimore, Maryland. The two visited George Balabushka to try to learn how he was making cues, but he would not tell or show them anything, so they visited a few cuemakers in Chicago to learn some basics. With a manual lathe, a butcher shop band saw, a drill press, and a work bench, they set out to make cues that were better than what they had previously been playing with.
Although the first cue they made ended up in the trash, they sold the second one at a profit. Soon they were hand engraving the word "Joss" on the Delrin butt caps of the cues. The first one was for Ronnie Allen. They chose the word Joss from an oriental term that loosely translates to luck. It can mean good or bad fortune, depending on the individual.
Since their road experience introduced them to the best players in the country, they had a large market for cues. Soon these players were using Joss cues, and they quickly became known as one of the most popular player?s cues of that time. Early Joss cues from that time period have become very desirable to collectors. They will have a very distinctive hand-carved Joss logo on Delrin or Implex butt caps, and will usually have a 5/16 in. joint screw, although they experimented with several other screws, settling on the 5/16 in. very late in their partnership.
The two worked together until 1972, when Dan bought out Bill?s end of the company, and Bill began making his own cues under the name Joss West in Aspen, Colorado. Right after Bill left, Dan sent out pictures of his cues to all past Joss customers. The result was more orders than he could handle by himself. So, he called his friend, Tim Scruggs, who had worked for three months at Joss around 1970, and offered him a permanent full-time position. Immediately, they began filling the new orders."
