'Hand Made' Cues - Do they have any inherent value?

[jimmymoller]

okay I should have said have owned not own. My first definitely was and there are bound to have been a few pass through my hands in the last 50 plus years.
Reality is though you talk and talk and talk yet non of it can be considered by normal people to make the slightest bit of sense. Your now saying steamed wood is brittle and splinters Yet millions of chairs have been made with steaming being a fundamental part of their make up.

[Big Splash!]

okay I should have said have owned not own. My first definitely was and there are bound to have been a few pass through my hands in the last 50 plus years.
Reality is though you talk and talk and talk yet non of it can be considered by normal people to make the slightest bit of sense. Your now saying steamed wood is brittle and splinters Yet millions of chairs have been made with steaming being a fundamental part of their make up.

Steamed wood isn't used to make fine furniture or musical instruments. So why should it be used to make cues? By steamed, I mean how it was dried out in the kiln, NOT how it was bent into different shapes once it had been dried. Though if it's been steamed twice, lord above, it must be **** to work with.

Here's the thing, I can name three cues made of AD, me mate can name his CC Sherwood, and Ramon had an AD made by Craftsmen Cues. I still have the Powerglide catalogue so I know I'm bang on and I know the cue was made in 1985. I'm not here saying me 'old cues' are probably made from AD because that's bogus and any opinion on how they play would be bogus too. It's important to be factually correct, in order to do accurate analysis. I don't want that to sound pompous but relying on 'maybes' ain't using reliable evidence. Life is experiential. There are plenty who will say that AD doesn't feel different, but they've never had an AD, they just think they might have. I can feel the difference, me mate can feel the difference and Ramon can feel the difference. That's evidence from people who've owned AD cues. The naysayers probably think the earth is flat as well.

[billabong]

'Hand Made' Cues - Do they have any inherent value?

I've got both air dried and not air dried, and I can't tell if the air dried is better.
different specs, and to be honest, who gives a - - - - ?
as long as your post count goes up, I imagine you'll keep this going for another wee while, eh ?

[jimmymoller]

oh lets amuse him there's bugger all on the box.

Steamed wood isn't used to make fine furniture or musical instruments

Steamed Swiss Pearwood Has exceptional tone qualities and the finest flutes are made from it. go google it if you don't believe me.

So why should it be used to make cues?

It has been used to make cues and was the most popular shaft wood amongst the rich who could afford it. It was and still is used as a shaft because it has an exceptional smoothness to it. It's demise as a shaft wood was due in the main to its availability. Few importers would bother with it when they could buy cheap air dried ash.

This generation grew up with cheap ash and maple and never saw it never mind got to play with it.

[Big Splash!]

I am more than aware that pearwood has been made into cue, oak has been made into cues along with god knows how many other timbers. My question is why? Why would you wish to have pear wood (and there's plenty of it going cheap in the Midlands/orchards) when you can have bog maple that's sat at the bottom of a US lake for two hundred years, compressing and maturing. As smooth and better feedback/resonance. These are the two premium timbers to build cues from.

[jimmymoller]

You find me a smoother piece of wood than steamed pear that has all the qualities of an ash shaft and i'll come to your house and stick my head down your bog. That's a promise.

[jimmymoller]

Ash and maple are a joke compared to Steamed Pear. Mugs will spend £100's just to get uniformed chevrons that they need to fill in with grain filler. And the Yanks who no doubt use more maple for cues than any one else buy cotton gloves so that they can run it smoothly through their bridge hand. :ROFLMAO

Now if you get a blemish free piece of pear concentrate on where your hitting the cue ball do the business and the smile on your face simply refuses to go away.

[itsnoteasy]

Why aren't these cues all the rage Jimmy? Expense? Rarity of decent shafts?

[jimmymoller]

You only have to look at the trees themselves, North American Ash grows tall and straight in a more suitable climate for it than English Ash thus the prettier looking even grain and like Maple there are thousands and thousands of acres of it. Thus as a wood it's plentiful, hopefully sustainable for many many years, suits the requirements of a cue and most of all cheap.
Pear trees grow to a fraction of the height and as any kid who has ever climbed one will tell you being like a twisty apple tree it's easy to climb thus when felled and in the timber mills it produces boards which are far less straight and uniformed than Ash or Maple with plenty of knots. Hornbeam is similar in that it too is suitable for cues but it's a much smaller tree etc.
So getting a plentiful supply of decent pear is more difficult and more expensive when you do find it.
So very few snooker cues (not including old billiard cues here) exist that are steamed pear and thus so few are ever tried by anyone it's virtually an alien wood to cueists. But get a good in and it's a keeper for life. Mine certainly is.

[sanman]

I am more than aware that pearwood has been made into cue, oak has been made into cues along with god knows how many other timbers. My question is why? Why would you wish to have pear wood (and there's plenty of it going cheap in the Midlands/orchards) when you can have bog maple that's sat at the bottom of a US lake for two hundred years, compressing and maturing. As smooth and better feedback/resonance. These are the two premium timbers to build cues from.

Firstly you are clueless about pressure. Compression would only occur when there was an imbalance of pressure. In the case of your bog wood those woods did not sink until they were saturated and being saturated underwater the forces within each cell would cancel the forces outside each cell. Hence NO COMPRESSION ever occurred. If compression did occur then the Titanic would be flatter than a farthing and same for all wrecks down the ocean. Secondly if compression did occur it would rupture the cell structure of wood and destroy the wood properties we all associate with wood. Like elasticity, strength, etc. Don’t believe what I say read a physics text. So please shut up about compression. Everyone is entitled to an opinion even if it’s a belief, however when that belief is shown to be factually incorrect a better man accepts that he is wrong and adopts this new knowledge. However if you argue against what I have just laid out here mate I suggest you apply for a professorship someplace where this knowledge, which goes against the laws of physics, is accepted.

[Big Splash!]

Nah, you're wrong. Aurora are right.

[sanman]

Nah, you're wrong. Aurora are right.

Same aurora who cheated people out of cues and other products. Same fictitious Airin who rose from the grave like Jesus second coming as Richard. Yeah right. U really smart.

[jimmymoller]

Yeah you tell him sanman hahaha
Splash has done a search of Pearwood on the TSF wherein most if not all were saying Pearwood warps, it's brittle it's no good as a cue etc. but not one of them had any idea as non of them had ever seen a Pearwood cue except for perhaps a picture of a Mannock.

[Big Splash!]

Yeah you tell him sanman hahaha
Splash has done a search of Pearwood on the TSF wherein most if not all were saying Pearwood warps, it's brittle it's no good as a cue etc. but not one of them had any idea as non of them had ever seen a Pearwood cue except for perhaps a picture of a Mannock.

Utter rubbish. Many on here are serious cue collectors and have owned everything under the sun. They ain't cue and tip bodgers like you and they know their beans. If they say pear warps, pear warps. Get over it. :biggrin-new: Maple also warps more than ash if it hasn't been air-dried. Closer cell woods that are more dense all have a tendency to warp. Which is why shafts aren't made from really dense woods such as ebony, lignum vitae etc. If these timbers didn't warp, we'd have naturally heavier cues with better BP. But they do warp; it's a fact of life with closer cell, dense hardwoods. Another reason ash is superior, if dried carefully and looked after, it is less prone to warping over time.

As for Aurora, they built the best maple cues ever and members said that. It was down to bog maple and their superior finishing skills; skills unsurpassed by any real cue maker.

[DeanH]

Aurora use an electric drill with buffing attachment to do the last finish polish - does that now make the cues non-handmade as a machine has been used during the cues construction?