The Black Dot Bullseye Shaft is the result of many years of research and development to bring to the player the optimum conditions necessary to play the extremely accuracy-demanding game of Billiards.
The goal of the Black Dot Bullseye Shaft is to deliver to you the player something that has never been done before by any cue makers (custom or production) – any time or anywhere including Meucci Originals. That goal is to provide multiple shafts that play precisely the same, while reducing cue ball deflection and increasing power to an unprecedented level.
Why is that important to you as the player? Decreased cue ball deflection, and increased power should be obvious. As you might know, your mind adjusts to the very fine variations in the shaft you choose to play with over a fairly short period of time. But heaven help you if the tip comes off that special shaft in the MIDDLE of intense competition.
As all top players know, one shaft fits their brain (sight picture) better than the other, unused shaft in their case. If you don’t believe that, open any top player’s case and the second shaft will be virtually unused and the player might tell you that one of the shafts (the dirty shaft) happens to be his favorite; meanwhile, the other shaft remains clean and fairly unused. There is a very good reason for this phenomenon and it has to do with the differences in natural wood, and the power of the human mind.
Single-piece, maple shafts vary considerably from one to the next because of the grain structure created by the location that the shaft is cut from within the particular tree. Fast growth wood – near the center of the log – is softer, and more flexible, where later growth rings nearer the outside of a large tree, are closer together and create a much stiffer shaft. That variation is as much as more than double the stiffness from one side of the spectrum of the tree to the other. When you take into consideration the differences in the wood grain and the time it takes for the human mind to readjust to the fine nuances of “sight picture,” this is more than a player should have to deal with when attempting to change from one shaft to the other. For these reasons, we have decided to take random chance out of the picture.
When we released generation 1 of our performance shafts, the red dot shaft, it was a quantum leap in performance in regards to power and reduction of deflection. However, the flaw in the red dot that has now been cured by generation 2, the black dot bullseye, is the fact that it was made from one solid piece of maple.
The Black Dot Bullseye Shaft is a composite of 35 single, hard-rock maple veneer pieces flat-laminated uni-directionally with extreme heat and pressure. Through multiple turnings, and stress-relieving processes the desired, optimal result is achieved by the perfect blend of the stiffness of the glue, the pressure used to laminate, and the consistency of thin, maple veneer. The variations between one Black Dot Bullseye Shaft (tapered the same) and another is no more than one and a half percent. This amount of variation would change the flight of the object ball on a Black Dot Bullseye Shaft with a Meucci Power Piston butt as little as ten one-thousandths of an inch, when shooting a spot-to-spot shot into the corner pocket. Comparatively the variations between two one-piece maple shafts under the same conditions, would cause the object ball to vary by up to 100 times greater variation than the black dot bullseye.
Now let’s consider segmented shafts. The problem with the pie segmented shafts, when considering only one flaw, variations in stiffness, is that the segmented shaft is also under the influence of grain structure of the original wood used. All six, eight, ten, or twelve segments of the shaft coming from the same piece of wood, and the same location of the log it was hewn from brings us back to the same problem we addressed before with the single-piece shafts: variations in stiffness from one shaft to the next.
The benefits that we have discussed are only available in the Meucci Blackdot Bullseye shafts. There are other flat-laminated veneer shafts that have attempted to duplicate the performance of the Meucci Blackdot Bullseye, but tip, ferrule, and taper design have caused a deviation from the perfection that we have brought to fruition through many years of research and development.
Like never before, you now can have a perfect, matched set of shafts whether it be two, three, four or more, to increase the consistency and accuracy of your game.
Bob Meucci is the owner and founder of Meucci Originals, Inc., which manufactures
