American heresy

[ibsen]

I live in Colorado, and sadly, had only found one 12 foot snooker table to play on. Never less, I have started practicing, and playing by myself. I'm a straight pool (14.1) player, and use an American style pool cue. I have a Helmstetter, 58" long, 19.5oz, Kamui Med tip at 13mm. None of the local stores sell snooker cues, and the few only stores that sell snooker cues, are not of the best quality (at least for what I can see).

As my cue is 58" in length, that makes my current maple shaft 29", and my heretic question that I'm posing to you is... Could I get an Ash shaft made for my current cue butt (maybe 31" in length and 9.5mm tip), and can I play at a good level with it? Or is it better to buy a complete snooker cue?

If the answer is get a whole snooker cue, are the 1/2 joint snooker cues not as good at the 1 piece or 3/4? If the answer is that I can just get a shaft, do you know of anyone that makes Ash shafts for American pool cues? Or can I just get an American cue maker to make one out of maple?

[sanman]

Get a new cue mate. You could get a decent one for 250 dollars. Am pretty sure that if you had a front half of the shaft made by one of the American cue makers it would not be as good as a stand alone cue made for snooker. Also you might wind up paying as much or more than 250 dollars for the work carried out. Then there is the balance issue with pool cue morphing to a snooker cue. Can be done but I believe you would be better of with a stand alone snooker cue.

[Hello, Mr Big Shot]

You could use a z2 or ob2, or similiar. Not sure what joint helmstetters use - 5/16x14 at a guess.

Or you could have a spare shaft turned down to 10.5 or 11mm. Shouldn't be expensive and there's no reason for it to be ash at all - many snooker cues are maple anyway.

[Tred]

Absolutely, there's no reason why you can't. Andy Travis made three ash shafts for my Poison Nitro (1 x snooker, 1 x US Pool, 1 x UK Pool):

http://www.thesnookerforum.co.uk/boa...ison-Nitro-cue