Who and Why was LD shaft invented

mortuarymike-nv

mortuarymike-nv

mortuarymike-nv
Silver Member
I know very little about LD shafts.

This is what I have heard and i could be wrong.

In the mid 80ees production cue companies just couldnt keep up with the deman of good seasoned solid maple shafts and trying to warranty the shafts that were warping.

One of the production cue companies was going broke and didnt pay their maple shaft wood supplier and they got cut off.
at that time the only maple they could get was low grade so the started to glue it together and turning shafts out.

all the other cue companies having problems with shafts warping jumped on the band wagon and now it is hard to find a 125..00 cue with solid maple shaft.

The other part is i dont think pool players realy know what a art it is to pick and produce shafts that stay straight.

Not wanting to upset anyone but i have had a lot of predator and Muecci shafts chucked up in my lathe And i am not impressed with them.

The g core shafts and other production cue makers with all the resin and epoxy in the shafts in my opinion kills the hit of the shaft and the sound and feed back sucks......

I have heard the new tiger shafts play nice And i have a new kevin varney cue in that has one of his Ld shafts on it.
The kevin Vaney cue plays very nice with a lot of ball control.

In a nut shell I get the impression That the Ld shaft came into existence
because solid maple shafts are to expensive to warranty warpage.
plus the fact the cues you have in stock are warping faster than they can be sold

The out come seems to have its positive side of low deflection hit.
Thus making it possible to get more spin being able to do more with CB control.
Learning how to control all the spin plus deflection is where some pool players do really well with this. And other pool players dont and it makes their game inconsistent.

Not to take pool cues back 40 years but one thing i was taught was keep it simple stupid look for the natural path of the cue ball first.

If some one knows the (truth) about who invented and mass produced the first LD shafts and why Ld shafts were invented I would like to Know.

MMike
 
Laminated shafts have nothing to do with being low deflection. It's just glued together wood. End mass affects deflection properties.

Predator took a laminated shaft and hollowed out the end of the shaft. Otherwise, it would just be a laminated shaft. There are many LD shafts that are not laminated... like the Varney LD shaft you mentioned. Did you ever sell that Varney? If not, you should consider keeping it.
 
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Dufferin had laminated shafts in the 80's. I played with 5 NOS and the hit sporty. One was amazing.
 
mortuarymike-nv said:
I know very little about LD shafts.

This is what I have heard and i could be wrong.

In the mid 80ees production cue companies just couldnt keep up with the deman of good seasoned solid maple shafts and trying to warranty the shafts that were warping.

One of the production cue companies was going broke and didnt pay their maple shaft wood supplier and they got cut off.
at that time the only maple they could get was low grade so the started to glue it together and turning shafts out.

all the other cue companies having problems with shafts warping jumped on the band wagon and now it is hard to find a 125..00 cue with solid maple shaft.

The other part is i dont think pool players realy know what a art it is to pick and produce shafts that stay straight.

Not wanting to upset anyone but i have had a lot of predator and Muecci shafts chucked up in my lathe And i am not impressed with them.

The g core shafts and other production cue makers with all the resin and epoxy in the shafts in my opinion kills the hit of the shaft and the sound and feed back sucks......

I have heard the new tiger shafts play nice And i have a new kevin varney cue in that has one of his Ld shafts on it.
The kevin Vaney cue plays very nice with a lot of ball control.

In a nut shell I get the impression That the Ld shaft came into existence
because solid maple shafts are to expensive to warranty warpage.
plus the fact the cues you have in stock are warping faster than they can be sold

The out come seems to have its positive side of low deflection hit.
Thus making it possible to get more spin being able to do more with CB control.
Learning how to control all the spin plus deflection is where some pool players do really well with this. And other pool players dont and it makes their game inconsistent.

Not to take pool cues back 40 years but one thing i was taught was keep it simple stupid look for the natural path of the cue ball first.

If some one knows the (truth) about who invented and mass produced the first LD shafts and why Ld shafts were invented I would like to Know.

MMike
Click to expand...



LD was invented because Bob Meucci had a problem getting shaft wood from his suppliers. So Good Old Bob looked at a piece of Plywood and said hell I can make my own shafts, thus the Black Dot Shaft was born. All flat laminated shafts are nothing more than Plywood turned round and tapered into a shaft.

So keep them dry guy's they may come apart!!!!
 
Ld shafts

Yes I have the varney with the LD shaft. the person saying they want the cue changed their mind i guess.

I struggle on which cues i like the best. I owned one other varney I bought it used it played so nice. Very impressed, this new varney I bought for resale and because it is new i cannot test the cue much i have hit 6 or 7 balls with it and I like the way it plays.

I know very little about LD shafts
And I was under the impression that most or all Ld shafts were Laminated or segmented or cored.

I see your point where realy a laminated shaft has nothing to do with the shaft being LD.

7 or 8 years ago i bought 3 muecci cue with a black dot shafts And the big hype was the shaft was low deflection this is where i get them mixed together plus the fact if you say ld shaft i alway's think of a predator shaft.

Thank you for pointing out the difference.
MMike
 
muecci

manwon said:
LD was invented because Bob Meucci had a problem getting shaft wood from his suppliers. So Good Old Bob looked at a piece of Plywood and said hell I can make my own shafts, thus the Black Dot Shaft was born. All flat laminated shafts are nothing more than Plywood turned round and tapered into a shaft.

So keep them dry guy's they may come apart!!!!
Click to expand...


I had a red dot i liked better then the black dot.
Yes that is the story i heard too.

MMike
 
Interesting story but it has nothing to do with how or why Steve Titus developed the Predator LD shaft. I can remember Titus and myself sitting around restaurants after the pool room in Ann Arbor was closed late at night in the early 1970s talking pool. I once told him about the golf club robot "Iron Byron" and I like to think I had something to do with Titus inventing the cue testing machinery he did. Carl Conlon came back from Japan with the early Helmstetter 3 cushion cues that completely changed the face of that game and that fueled Titus's and Dennis Dieckman's, and in a smaller fashion, my own, interest in pool cues. Titus tinkered with low deflection like Edison with light bulbs, he tried this idea and that idea, fitting trial runs into Iron Willie until he came up with something that worked (lower end mass for sure) and then formed Predator. My understanding is that Meucci's technology regarding deflection was far different from low end mess. I'm no engineer, but my understanding is that Meucci thought if the shaft was whippier, it would give less resistance at impact and deflect the ball less.

As far as how. The way I understand it, Titus would decide maybe it was something, say taper and taper the shaft the way he had decided to try. Sometimes that would involve going to Dieckman's and working on Dieckman's machines or making Dieckman do some work (no small feat). Then he would have a finished product, he'd fit it into Willie and measure the deflection. My understanding is that he went through 100s of trial variations before he came upon low end mass, and once he did, started hollowing out shafts and dealing with ferrule size and weight and perfecting it. Simplified version, but then he went partners with Allan McCarty and they filed patents and started Predator.

Dieckman went on to be a cue builder of some repute, very much inspired by Hemstetter and his methodology.

Helmstetter went on to change golf, developing Big Bertha.

I went on to be a cue pimp.

As an aside, Ernie Gutierrez in the 1960s had a contraption suspended from his ceiling over a pool table that would swing a pool cue so he could test his pool cue ideas.

The cue world according to me.

Thanks

Kevin
 
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LD is not necessarily laminated, and laminated is not necessarily LD. They are two different things.

As far as laminated shafts, since it seems that is actually what you were talking about, I believe they were done way before the eighties actually.

I believe it was in the early seventies that Paul Huebler did it, though I could be wrong.

I am not a big fan of laminated shafts, but I believe the original intent was very likely to produce a more stable shaft.

The broader topic would be "engineered" shafts. That has been going on a long time. Ferrule types and sizes, tip sizes, tapers, joint types, etc are all in fact matters of engineering a shaft. Carrying it further to laminating is just more engineering with the intent of tailoring the characteristics of the final product.

The polar opposite would seem to be a wood pin shaft without a ferrule.

There are arguments for either extreme and everything in between. I don't think anybody is unaware of the high degree of experience and knowledge it takes to select premium shaft wood. But the reality is that even very seasoned, very experienced master cue makers disagree on key points of how to select shaft wood. That being the case one should likely suppose that neither is right.

I don't think ant anybody's argument is necessarily right or wrong in this matter, it falls into personal preference, even for the best cue makers actually. People fall into different schools of thought on the matter. Of course that does not include the many and various "myths" that exist on the toppic...I am talking outside of those matters.

Personally, I am of the old school thinking myself. I like traditional maple shafts and I prefer old wood.
 
LD Cues

kvinbrwr said:
Interesting story but it has nothing to do with how or why Steve Titus developed the Predator LD shaft. I can remember Titus and myself sitting around restaurants after the pool room in Ann Arbor was closed late at night in the early 1970s talking pool. I once told him about the golf club robot "Iron Byron" and I like to think I had something to do with Titus inventing the cue testing machinery he did. Carl Conlon came back from Japan with the early Helmstetter 3 cushion cues that completely changed the face of that game and that fueled Titus's and Dennis Dieckman's, and in a smaller fashion, my own, interest in pool cues. Titus tinkered with low deflection like Edison with light bulbs, he tried this idea and that idea, fitting trial runs into Iron Willie until he came up with something that worked (lower end mass for sure) and then formed Predator. My understanding is that Meucci's technology regarding deflection was far different from low end mess. I'm no engineer, but my understanding is that Meucci thought if the shaft was whippier, it would give less resistance at impact and deflect the ball less.

As far as how. The way i understand it, Titus would decide maybe it was something, say taper and taper the shaft the way he had decided to try. Sometimes that would involve going to Dieckman's and working on Dieckman's machines or making Dieckman do some work (no small feat). Then he would have a finished product, he's fit it into Willie and measure the deflection. My understanding is that he went through 100s of trial variations before he came on low end mass, and once he did, started hollowing out shafts and dealing with ferrule size and weight and perfecting it. Simplified version, but then he went partners with Allan McCarty and they filed patents and started Predator.

Dieckman went on to be a cue builder of some repute, very much inspired my Hemstetter.

Helmstetter went on to change golf, developing Big Bertha.

I went on to be a cue pimp.

As an aside, Ernie Gutierrez in the 1960s had a contraption suspended from his ceiling over a pool table that would swing a pool cue so he could test his pool cue ideas.

The cue world according to me.

Thanks

Kevin
Click to expand...
Thank you kevin
I would of never known if i wouldnt of asked the question .

To be honest i thought Muecci was the first up until now........................

MMike
 
mortuarymike-nv said:
Thank you kevin
I would of never known if i wouldnt of asked the question .

To be honest i thought Muecci was the first up until now........................

MMike
Click to expand...

MMike

Its not wrong to say Meucci was the first, he was certainly concerned with deflection and experimenting with the cause and effect thing very early on. Its just that he didn't develop what is now accepted as the "low deflection" solution.

Thanks

Kevin
 
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i stand corrected

Sorry everyone very poor choice of words.
I put all other than ( solid ) maple shafts into the same catagory.
Very un-educated thought and statment on my part.

Because black dot, predator, OB , I thought that all Ld shafts were laminated in some way or another. anyway i was way off base sorry.
MMike
 
Mike Webb has now (or maybe had for a while) a very nice playing LD shaft, does not seem to be a spliced shaft, so a LD shaft from solid wood is doable. A friend of mine got two made and they have a very nice hit, better than the Predator he had.
 
hang-the-9 said:
Mike Webb has now (or maybe had for a while) a very nice playing LD shaft, does not seem to be a spliced shaft, so a LD shaft from solid wood is doable. A friend of mine got two made and they have a very nice hit, better than the Predator he had.
Click to expand...

DUH :groucho:
 
Kevin...Just curious, but where does Allen Clawson fit in here. Wasn't he one of Predator's founders?

Scott Lee
www.poolknowledge.com

kvinbrwr said:
Interesting story but it has nothing to do with how or why Steve Titus developed the Predator LD shaft. I can remember Titus and myself sitting around restaurants after the pool room in Ann Arbor was closed late at night in the early 1970s talking pool. I once told him about the golf club robot "Iron Byron" and I like to think I had something to do with Titus inventing the cue testing machinery he did. Carl Conlon came back from Japan with the early Helmstetter 3 cushion cues that completely changed the face of that game and that fueled Titus's and Dennis Dieckman's, and in a smaller fashion, my own, interest in pool cues. Titus tinkered with low deflection like Edison with light bulbs, he tried this idea and that idea, fitting trial runs into Iron Willie until he came up with something that worked (lower end mass for sure) and then formed Predator. My understanding is that Meucci's technology regarding deflection was far different from low end mess. I'm no engineer, but my understanding is that Meucci thought if the shaft was whippier, it would give less resistance at impact and deflect the ball less.

As far as how. The way I understand it, Titus would decide maybe it was something, say taper and taper the shaft the way he had decided to try. Sometimes that would involve going to Dieckman's and working on Dieckman's machines or making Dieckman do some work (no small feat). Then he would have a finished product, he'd fit it into Willie and measure the deflection. My understanding is that he went through 100s of trial variations before he came upon low end mass, and once he did, started hollowing out shafts and dealing with ferrule size and weight and perfecting it. Simplified version, but then he went partners with Allan McCarty and they filed patents and started Predator.

Dieckman went on to be a cue builder of some repute, very much inspired by Hemstetter and his methodology.

Helmstetter went on to change golf, developing Big Bertha.

I went on to be a cue pimp.

As an aside, Ernie Gutierrez in the 1960s had a contraption suspended from his ceiling over a pool table that would swing a pool cue so he could test his pool cue ideas.

The cue world according to me.

Thanks

Kevin
Click to expand...
 
Scott Lee said:
Kevin...Just curious, but where does Allen Clawson fit in here. Wasn't he one of Predator's founders?

Scott Lee
www.poolknowledge.com
Click to expand...

Scott

Yikes, don't get technical on me, everything I know i know because I'm pals from the old days with Titus and Dieckman. The way I understand it, Titus really developed the original successful LD prototype shafts (with the help of Dieckman and his machinery and wood knowledge). Titus met McCarty, who was at the time running Clawson cues. McCarty had the marketing and corporate knowledge (and a company at his disposal), with Titus being the tech guy. I think they soon folded Clawson Cues into Predator.

Or something like that.

Thanks

Kevin
 
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