Search This Site
Send to a Friend
Our Main Page
RAVEN Cues
Jump/Break tips
Limited Series
About Us
Used Cues
How to Buy
Discount Store
What People Say
Billiards Speak
Cue Care
Trade Up
Warranty
Publications
Engraving
Contact Us
Play Better
Billiards News
Teaching Videos
Why RAVEN
RAVEN Taper
RAVEN Owners
Inside a RAVEN
Pool Music
Pool Humor
Pool Pictures
Components
Custom Orders
Build your Own
Tournaments
For Collectors
Cue Anatomy
Lost or Stolen
Different Woods
Pool Game Rules
Directory Links
Fun Pool Videos
Old Growth Wood
What We Don't Do
Pool Cue Repairs
No Illegal Materials
Appearances
Non-Billiards
Sitemap
Billiards Speak
Register
© Copyright 2000-2008
RAVEN Custom Cues
Marion, IA 52302
How to fit a cue. Unfortunately there is no magic. You can't just go out and buy a cue that will let you move immediately into the upper echelon of pool players. Conventional wisdom says ‘you can’t buy a better game’. I think that is mostly, but not entirely true. Where this conventional wisdom breaks down has to do with degrees of improvement, not miracles. Let me digress for a minute. I play golf, too. When I started I could hit the ball a long way, but I had no accuracy. Everything sliced. I will confess that much of my slice had to do with my less than perfect swing path. But when I started making my own golf clubs, I experimented with shaft flex. I quickly found the old axiom ‘the stiffer the shaft the straighter the shot’ was true. My control improved dramatically simply by switching to stiffer shafts in my clubs. I did lose some distance, but I had plenty to begin with so the overall result was definitely in my favor. The standard size golf grip was too small for my hands. Increasing the grip size under the middle fingers of my right hand also improved my control. Shortening the length of the shafts in my wedges even more gave me greater accuracy on my scoring clubs. Cavity backed irons helped. Where the shaft flexed changed my ball flight. Changing the loft and lie of irons let me tailor ball flight to suit me. The modifications I made go on and on. The bottom line is nothing about my golf clubs is now standard. Everything is customized to either reduce the negative impact of ‘less than perfect swings’ or to take advantage of the things I do well. The overall result is I went from rarely breaking 100 to playing in the high 70s to low 80s in about 3 years. I’m never going to make the pro tour, but that is a heck of an improvement. Some of the improvement is directly attributable to equipment modification. In other cases the equipment modifications allowed me to begin to do things I couldn’t do before. I now draw the ball instead of the slice. When the ball does go right it is more of a fade than a banana slice. In effect, with a lot of effort and experimentation, I did buy a better golf game. To a great degree I’ve done the same with pool and you can too, if you are willing to put in the time and effort. Hopefully, as you read further, I can steer you in the right directions to ease some of the burden. By using different materials and different construction techniques RAVEN Cues are built to different lengths, overall weights, balance points and even different butt dimensions to account for the needs of different players. Generally the best advice given to someone who wants to buy a cue is ‘choose the right shaft taper, a good tip, and a cue that feels good to you in your price range’. This isn’t bad advice, but it is almost meaningless. The reason it is almost meaningless is because what is 'good and right' for me may well not be good and right for you. I’m going to try to address, length, overall weight, balance point, weight distribution, shaft and butt diameter, shaft taper, joints, ferrules and tips in such a way as to let you make sense of what the various combinations of these elements mean. More importantly I hope to arm you with enough information for you to start to apply what it means to your playing cue. | ||
To RAVEN Cues Home Page