arsenius said:
Does anyone have any experience with certain cases not adequately protecting their cues?
More than you can imagine. It's why I started building cases in the first place.
I have enough stories to fill a book (okay a small book) about cases that damaged a cue or did not adequately protect in hazardous situations.
But here is a personal one from me. A few years ago I purchased a bunch of cases from a well known cuemaker who had acquired them in a trade deal. Since I make cases I had looked them over and they appeared to be okay for the money.
The reason I bought them was to seal the deal on selling him some of mine. I figured I'd sell them locally and if anything were wrong I could always upgrade them for the customer.
Anyways, along with this deal came about five 1x2 bad Whitten/Guiseppe copies made of recycled leather. So one night I was headed out to the poolroom and I wanted to take my custom Joss instead of my regular setup.
So I grabbed on of these cases - brand new unused and put the butt of my cue in it normally, not hard. And the BOTTOM came out and my butt slid out the bottom and was scratched deeply by the exposed nails as it came all the way out.
If you don't believe me ask Mark Smith of Mark Smith cues in Russellville Arkansas who did the refinish on the cue after that. I gave him the cue that night. I took pictures of the whole thing and I don't have them on my laptop but I do have them as proof.
The point is here that you really have NO IDEA what kinds of shortcuts or crappy construction has been used to make a no name case. These factories could care less about your cue, all they care about is getting a product out the door at the price point the distributer demands.
Most people will never have a problem, at least not one that they care about. When your cue develops small scratches here and there you may not think to attribute it to the case. But I can tell you that the interior of many cases has things in it that do scratch the finish.
Since the advent of cases where you can't see the interior beyond the first few inches this is more and more of a problem. Most people buy a case for it's outward appearance without the slightest thought as to how it's constructed internally.
Last point - the "Leather" cases on Ebay that sell so cheap: Most of them are not leather, they only have a few exposed parts that are in order to fool the seller and buyer. I had threatened to burn one at my booth one year to stop the manufacturer and distributer from claiming that they were leather when they are not. It's really a crapshoot when you buy the knockoffs or unknown brands on Ebay or otherwise. If something happens in a few months to the case you usually have no guarantee at all and if something happens to your cue you won't get any compensation.
In 13 years I have only had a few situations where someone claimed that an Instroke case damaged their cue. In one case it was 100% our fault and we paid for repairs to the cue and of course replaced the case. IN the other it was just a very soft finish and a situation where we couldn't really account for every possible method of cue finish. But we paid for a refinish on the shafts and modified the case. And the others were not our fault at all but we took care of the customer anyway. Try and get this from the seller of a no name knockoff. They don't have the margins or the support network to offer that kind of service.
I always look at like this; how many years do I expect to have trouble free use of a product? Divide that by the price you paid and that is the real cost. With Instroke I often saw folks who had five years or more of trouble free use and with the knockoffs I often came across stories of cases developing problems within weeks and months of purchase. So my advice if you want to go with a name brand is to stick with the ones where you know the service will be there IF something happens. Don't buy from just any Joe Blow trunker who happens to have been able to score a deal on a bunch of cases and is blowing them out cheap. You might find that sweet deal to be the most expensive case on earth.
John Barton - thinks too much about cue cases.
that was Guiseppe.
