I own both an Arounceville and a Davis blank cue. To me, both are quality. My Arounceville is a wrapless double pointed sneaky or whatever that style of splicing is called and my Davis is a four veneered wrapless sneaky also.
I don’t own any super high-end custom half splice cues even though I could afford to buy one or two if I chose to. I just prefer to be able to discern the human element of production in my custom cues.
I’m probably an odd ball, but I don’t like perfectly even points and cues that have perfectly CNC’ed inlays and decorative elements in them. I find that type of “perfect” machining visually boring and unstimulating. When you create an image in your head, whether it be a painting or staring at a river, your brain is collecting and assembling unnumbered quantities of disparate visual elements and assembling them into an understandable and recognizable “whole” which you perceive as a unified image. High end cues tend to do the unifying for you. All the visual organization is done for you. This is why many of us on this site like straight up wood porn. There is no completed intrinsic design or organic intention to wood grain. It’s just there and you as a viewer have to mentally capture, unify and visually control it to enjoy looking at it.
Before someone goes nuts on me, yes I do believe there are some great cuemakers who do go beyond perfect cookie-cutter stylization in their cuemaking, but due to the limited canvas cuemakers have to work with, it’s a very difficult and expensive thing to achieve.
So, when someone like Davis has the skills and background to create a full splice blank using traditional hand build techniques and equipment which allows both the craftsman’s skill and human errors to coexist and show through at the same time, I will always choose those methods when considering which cues to buy. And when and if the human errors become a scar on the blank, then maybe it’s time to toss that one and try again. Some Davis blanks are definitely more perfectly done than others.
And he’s a really nice guy. He spent 4 hours in his garage/workshop with me BS’ing about factory life while I picked the veneers and he helped me design my cue and he picked the woods based on the final design.
It’s a good thing he doesn’t post on AZ, he’d be ripped apart royally by the high end cue collector crowd for his mundane and pedestrian approach to cuemaking. Snooty he isn’t. He’s a Schmelke fan—no more need be said. It doesn’t get any better than Schmelke.
Reply to previous posts: Davis is a retired machinist now and started building blanks again at retirement. Product “demand” is normally just a response to product availability. As long as Davis produces enough blanks to fill the “demand”, the demand for the product will never get any higher. Desirability is something different, however. The market can be totally flooded with a certain brand of car, for instance, and the lots can be full of unsold units, but they still can be desirable due to their quality and reputation—they’re just not in demand due to their availability--at that point the people who can afford them and really want them already have them.
