cue making, repairs and help

[MikeWooldridge]

yes but i'll only pay 2.50 an hour. do you fancy it?

and you'll have to put up with sexual harrassment in the workplace

from the missus, not me. mind you i haven't seen what you look like yet

[keith auld]

Hi Trevs and Mike - thanks for your good wishes and Mike you could well be right about the end of the 'great' cuemakers. The Chinese, apart from having the cheap labour and throwing massive technical expertise at cuemaking, have unfortunately also been buying up all the best stocks af Sri Lankan Ebony and container loads of top grade American ash. I spoke to my supplier of ash in America last week and he said he had recently shipped 2 x 40ft containers of ash to China, that's a hell of a lot of cues; and it's not confined to cues, I do a fair amount of table restoration, partcularly on antique tables,
and most of the championship tables also now come out of China.
I know as cue makers most of us have well equipped workshops and over the years have invested heavily in machinery, but what I'm concentrating on is teaching students how to make a cue using just a table saw, sander and ordinary hand plane. As you point out Mike, there will always be a need for repairs and this would allow for a hobby and cottage industry, and it does go further, because this was the method I used when Robert Osborne came to me and asked to be taught (at that stage he didn't even know how to use a hand plane) and he makes pretty good cues now, and he's moved on to bigger and better things. He later also worked with Will Hunt, and no doubt learnt a great deal from him. So perhaps we all need a little help along the way, none of us are that clever that we know all the answers !! I'm still learning and hopefully will keep learning until I pack it in totally.

[MikeWooldridge]

you were lucky to have a table saw and sander!

my first cue was made with a blunt hand saw, blunt hand plane, and lots of crappy sheets of sandpaper.

jesus christ, was that hard work! cutting a 20" length of ebony into tapered splices with a blunt saw. they should put that on some of the endurance game shows

i still use the same hand plane today though. but it tends to be a bit sharper

sri lankan ebony? from what i've seen, the chinese have certainly not been getting good stuff cos the quality is poor and 'unblack'. i know a few chinese manufacturers and they often quote black african ebony, but they look like various asian varieties which are never as good as african and certainly not as good as sri lankan.

anyway, wasn't sri lankan banned years ago? so i don't see how the chinese could be buying it.

you're right about learning. i certainly do not think i know everything and am still learning new things myself. life would be very boring if there was nothing left to learn...

[888]

hi, can some one guide me how's Hickory woods looks like? never seen b4? thanks..

[MikeWooldridge]

it's good on bbqs...

[Qubit]

you were lucky to have a table saw and sander!

my first cue was made with a blunt hand saw, blunt hand plane, and lots of crappy sheets of sandpaper.

That sounds very familiar as that is pretty much how im currently im trying to do it! Will hopefully be investing in a powered saw soon though which should make life a lot easier.

[trevs1]

In response to Keiths post above,

I have a feeling there'll always be room for a few specialist makers, and, that they'll be here after we've all gone. I believe it's usually the case that someone somewhere is willing to continue working in these niche type arts or crafts, and if they do that, it woud be likely that some of them will become excellent at it and go on to develop some form of business out of it.

I totally agree that the demand, and ultimately the price, for materials is pushed up by the rapid development in the far east. Still, we can't complain about that here in Europe, we've had the lions share of everything for so long, often at the expense of these countries. Ebony has been undersold in many ways for such a long time, but now, it's getting to a point where it's perhaps achieving more of a realistic price, who knows, I guess it's a matter of how we look at the situation.

I definitely think there will be interest in learning to build cues in the fashion you speak of, although to what degree I don't know. I think quite a few might be mortified when they see just how much effort it is to make a single cue in that way. Having said that, there is something theraputic in it, especially if you don't 'HAVE TO' do it.

It's definitely rewarding then, no doubt.

[trevs1]

In response to Mike's post above,

Yeh, it's a scary thought thinking of how it was when you start isn't it?
Bloody hell, I wouldn't want to go back to that, no way. As I said above, I reckon people would be stunned by how hard and laborious it is to completely hand build a cue, NO POWER TOOLS OR MACHINERY AT ALL.........Ooh nasty.

I've not seen any Chinese cues bar one with anything like top quality ebony either, so who is buying it there and what for I don't know. I think they buy lots for guitar production, and by all accounts, really good stuff too. I guess it comes down to the mills producing and the markets willing to offer more (of whatever) than their competitors. Whenever there are large sums of money at stake, things will go on that not everyone will get to know about, that's for sure, so to a fair extent, I'd say we are somewhat in the dark. With respect to Indian ebony, as far as I know it's had restrictions on it for a good spell now, though I'm sure it can be had in some quantity or another. I managed to get some earlier this year, it's astonishingly good too, but pricey.

I'd say it's likely the ebony used in the cues coming out of China would be African, but lower quality and with some considerable discolouration.

I wouldn't want to put money on that though.

[trevs1]

hi, can some one guide me how's Hickory woods looks like? never seen b4? thanks..

Hickory is similar in appearance to ash, but has a finer texture with a slightly less open grain.

Think of it as a super hard, heavy version of ash, and you'll be close.

[MikeWooldridge]

Think of it as a super hard, heavy version of ash, and you'll be close.

better still, enjoy it as a great smoked flavour beef

[keith auld]

As mentioned previously I'm sure we all have well equipped workshops so perhaps the time's come to move to an easier way and accept a 'if you can't beat them join them' attitude and mechanise. I recently helped one of my apprentices make a 92" bed lathe with router and powerfeed and 60 degree live centre, this can turn a 60" x 11/2" square piece of ash or maple perfectly with the minimum of effort and maximum accuracy and it can just keep repeating this, It can then be spliced and returned to the lathe matched to it's original drive points and the process repeated. I also have a 2 copy lathes in the workshop (the larger we use primarily for copying antique items being restored) but the smaller one is single phase and can be ordered and bought from B&Q for about £400 and can easily be used in a home workshop for turning cue butts. So to set up a home workshop to produce cues in 'bulk' need not cost more that £5000, not a lot in this day and age. Problem is the spiralling cost of materials. You can mechanise and reduce your labour costs by doing the cuemaking yourself and thereby only have the one wage bill and necessary drawings but your profitability comes from how well you buy and the quality you use generally reflects the final finished item. Re the Sri Lankan ebony - I heard from a supplier, and how true it is I don't know, but he said that the Sri Lankan ebony comes from one end of the island and has to be trucked through areas controlled by the Tamil Tigers and many of these have been blown up on the roads through, so the Sri Lankan government stopped heavy transport from that area in order to try to economically starve them out. As I say it may just be a good story and a way to get me to buy what he had available

[cocked hat]

Hi Keith,
I didn't reckon when you introduced yourself at the beginning of this thread that the conversation would turn to Tamil Tigers!Diverse or what

[keith auld]

Yeah, strange hey!!! - Think I'll just stick to cuemaking - too dangerous otherwise - Served in one war having grown up in Africa (Rhodesia) don't fancy getting involved in another one at my age !!

[ADR147]

i believe the tamil tigers control the north and the ebony comes from the southwest - would be a lot easier to ship it from there than drive it hundreds of miles through what is effectively a war zone?

[Watford]

I've been to Sri Lanka I saw ebony growing in the Southwest but for some reason I didn't vivit the North!