The third cue I built is the first with "nicer" woods. For it I used birdseye maple for the forarm with ebony points. The butt sleeve was to be ebony also but ended up being birdseye maple.

The process follows the Candy Cane cue (#2) very closely. In fact the two were built in tandem with the Candy Cane Cue leading the way in proving the set-ups and CNC coding before cutting the more expensive wood.

The pictures below show the forearm in process. The first showing the cut and tapered forearm with point grooves. The veneer layups, natural/green/natural/black, are seen below the forearm.

As before the points were layed up in a 90deg form and then glued into the forearm grooves. The resulting assembly is shown below. It was trimmed using a jig on the table saw, also shown below.

The resulting forearm is shown in the two pictures below. The points look clean and crisp, just the way we like them.

The art on the butt sleeve differs from Cues #1 and #2. I decided to do some ingraving rather than the Irish knot. For this I needed a CNC 4th axis. For building cues I made plates to hold a Sherline lathe head and tailstock on my knee mill. So, for the 4th axis I decided to use a Sherline head with a stepper motor added. I doubt it will hold much rotary load but seems OK for engraving.

After some thought and looking around I decided to "inlay" a gecko on the butt sleeve. A recess was cut using a V-bit. The CNC cuts deeper for a wider line, and shallower for a thinner line. The process is termed V-Carving. Being in a purely Linux environment I used F-Engrave to generate the CNC code. This produces recesses on a flat surface and a butt sleeve is round. Thus another program is needed to "wrap" the code around a cylinder. Socrch Works, who made F-Engrave, provide another program called G-Code Ripper, that does this cylinder wrap. For the gecko the recess is as below.

Once the recess is cut crushed stone was glued in and then cut smooth on the lathe. This works well for softer stone using carbide cutters. The first picture below is the gecko cut into an ebony butt sleeve with turquoise glued in. The second below shows a test piece of maple "inlayed" with malachite and turned smooth. For the Gecko cue I finally decided to use birdseye maple with a malachite "inlay". Malachite with ebony did not show up well and turquoise, in ebony, clashed with the green veneers and rings. SO, the final butt sleeve ended up birdseye maple with malachite.

The butt sleeve came out very nice as below. I also put my initials in the butt cap. This used the same V-Carve process as the gecko but with a blackned epoxy rather than crushed stone fill. I like this for thin lines where crushed stone is too course.

The points came out un-even as they did with the CandyCane cue. Probably for the same reason. Other than that flaw it is a beautiful cue.

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