Home at last…
After being gone four of past five weeks, I’m finally sleeping in my own comfy bed again.
My flight last night was 45 minutes delayed from Minneapolis. It was supposed to arrive at 6:15p.m. and Robert was going to pick me up and rush us over to my clinic of which I knew I would probably be a few minutes late to, but instead, I was an hour late. That sucked!
Apparently, we had a headlight out that needed to be replaced or something. I thought I remembered hearing something about that while I was fading in and out of consciousness while intermittently wondering why we were still sitting on the runway and not taking off yet.
Fortunately, I only lost one student, Butch, one of my regulars. He had just left before I arrived. I felt horrible for being so late. The Table Steaks East crew did do a great job of calming the natives, but I still hate making people wait around.
So, I ended up doing two special hour-long clinics for a group of 3 and then a group of 4 until about 10:30p.m. I was SO lucky to have Robert there to help out. I never could’ve handled all those people with my jetlagged self.
I didn’t play much afterwards because Robert had to run, but I did shoot a little bit with my new shaft and also the night before at league, Mike made me shoot with it then. I was cursing him the entire time. I ended up losing my match because I missed a few shots I probably would’ve fired in with my old cue. No doubt. UGH!
Honestly though, it wasn’t as dreadful as I’d remembered Predators being. I think the radial pin joint helps make the hit feel a little less “dead” and disconnected. More research to come this week.
Finalized the details for the Steve Knight Tribute pool tournament. It’ll be held at Rack ‘Em Billiards in Aurora on Saturday, December 8th at 1:00p.m. It’s open to all and it should be a great time! More formal announcement to come.
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Welcome back Samm.
Re the Predator feel issue: Eventually (stress eventually) you’ll decide you like it because of the reduced ’squirt’ which will force you to learn how to aim all over again (subconsciously this is why you dread playing with it…) over the lack of feel. Precisely why I never adopted it in the first place. However, there are several other low squirt shaft choices available, naturally trying them involves cost (both time & money). This is a process golfers instinctively recognize, but seems anathema to many would be pool players.
And you are right, the radial pin will help…some, I’ll save you the gory math details of joint construction/wave propagation physics.
Ron Shepard & Thierry Layani, both of whom can be found on USENET’s Rec.Sport.Billiard newsgroup have investigated this area extensively.
Ron is a Physicist at Argonne NL & Thierry is the maker of Layani Cues.
p.