How to Make a Pool Cue With Just Hand Tools

hey y'all I'm James Wright and welcome to would buy right - today we are making a pool cue and this is kind of a traditional way of doing it if sharing it down as opposed to turning out a lathe and I'm also doing a few things in here that aren't very traditional like the octagonal handle just feel better in the hand I like that and also it has a horse butt tip on it because well I have a lot of course but laying around for some reason but enough talking let's actually dive into making this thing I'm gonna be making this pole Q out of red oak I know that is a little bit unusual for a pool cube but I've got a good bit of it sitting around it's the same wood that I used on the top of the table so this is actually a nice piece for a fairly straight grain and nice and clean all the way down so I need to actually cut this down it is a piece about inch and a half an inch and half but I want to make diagonals actually hold a cradle to cut the pool cue and I have another scrap of red oak that was perfect for this so I can cut it from corner to corner and make these diagonal triangle pieces you all understand that a little bit so I need to clean off the saw marks and that means planing it down now these are longer than my bench at six foot long so I actually pinch it between a dog and the wall on the other end and that holds it in place while I complain it and then I can flip it around and do it from the other end means I'm going against the grain a little bit but it's not a huge issue as these do not need to be perfectly smooth and clean this is just making a jig to hold the pool cue that way I don't have to set it up on a spring pole lathe that's six foot long that would be an interesting time so you need to glue these in place it doesn't take much glue at all to hold them down and glue them down clamp them in place and if you're in a rush or you just want to go quicker resin using these clamps you can just put in screws from the bottom holds a rather nicely so I use a series of squeeze clamps every foot to eighteen inches so along here held it in place and it's basically that's all I need for the gluing I'm going to have one of these strips on either side so it creates a 90 degree cradle each one running at 45 degrees six foot long put a screw in one end as I stop later on I switched out that screw is it I actually didn't been to twist it in the the wood wasn't quite as good thought a thought of screw like that would hold but and not quite enough strength so now we need to work on the cue itself I want to mark off either end and then draw a circle one end is half inch and the other end is the full-width inch and a half and I was planning on making it all round at the beginning until I felt the octagonal every time I feel an octagon handle I just like now this is just a series of planing it smaller and smaller and smaller until you get down to the circles that either end one end is 1/2 inch and the other end is whatever size you make it right and I'm gonna be using a scrub plane for most of this as a scrub plane very quickly marches through material I think it was only about 40 minutes or so of actual planing to get this all down I found using a clamp on one end or the other if I was working on the opposite end just held it in place a little bit better made it a little easier to work with now to get that even taper from one end to the other you start at the end where you want to take off a lot of material and you take one little pass and then you back up another foot farther and you take another pass and then you back up another foot farther and you take another pass and each progressive pass gets longer and longer and longer until the last pass is right at the beginning and you'll notice that you get a really clean taper with that you can see I switched over to putting a lag screw all the way through and that helped perfectly I wish I had done that for the beginning the nice thing about this setup is you can quickly and easily just rotate it and run to town on it and so I'm going back and forth between the scrub plane and a jack the number 5 will then run over all the marks left by the scrub plane and smooth it out a little bit more so get much cleaner taper from one end to the other in between every now and then it's good to blow out all the extra chips as it gets really clogged up pretty quickly and so I'm going to do this on all four corners of the square and then I'm going to turn it 1/8 of a turn as I now have an octagon on the back and this will allow me to then taper it down a little further because I'll have a square on the small end and that square on the small end is half the size of what the original square was at 45 degrees hope that makes sense but it's one of those complicated things if you just think about it each time you're going to turn in a quarter of a time until you've gone all the way around then you're gonna turn it in eighth of a time and then after that you turn it over quarter a time until you go all the way around and that way you can get it down you can see how it was a square on that end and then now I'm turning that square back into an octagon getting closer and closer to that now because this was the first time I've used it the tapers on this end were too big it was running the plane was running into them so I'm scrubbing them off right here and I need to take them down to about a half-inch at the tip so that you the plane can actually get down to the work here you say I've done two opposing sides down to the circle and now I can flip it 90 degrees again and take down the other two opposing sides right down to the circle and I'll end up with another square on the tip and then I can turn it in eighth of a turn and take off the corners on that square and time left with an octagon that is all the way into to end nice and clean and with a good taper it sounds like a lot of work and it is a little bit but it's not as much as you expect it actually goes really quickly especially with a good sharp with a good sharp scrub plane it goes phenomenally fast you can see I'm getting down close to the size and I'll just be working along this making sure I'm taking off even amounts all the way along it well not even melts more at the tip than its back it's slowly working down and yes it was getting hot in the shop any time I do a lot of scrub work it gets hot especially with the extra weight I put on recently you take that off now that we've gotten the octagon it is easier to come in with a spokeshave and then take off all the corners and turn it into a 16 a gun and then from that into a 32 gone and then on from that one 264 gone until it's basically circular uh-huh and the sometimes you'll see me push it and sometimes you'll see me pull it it just depends on the grain of the wood which direction the grain is running is which direction you push the plane or the spoke shape and then in this I'm going to use a French curve card scraper and actually DFM tool works just put out the curved set of card scrapers so if you want one of those I'll try and leave a link to that down below they are from nominal to use and I'm looking forward to getting myself this is just a chief one I have on hand but you can never have enough card scrapers and you can see when you sharpen these up really well you get this beautiful curl coming off of them and they are a lot of fun to use especially in this shape where you get that curved curl oh just beautiful so I'm gonna work that up farther and farther and I was going to do it the whole way down but then I got about halfway and I thought you know I like the feel of the octagon so let's leave that alone so it is rounded halfway an octagon on the back half it just kind of tapers in between the two as you can see with that so after the card scraper it's basically done you can test it make sure there's no burrs no splinters nothing that's right onto if you want to go into sandpaper go for that but it doesn't need much of anything after the card scraper if it's sharp that's that's what you need make sure that everything is square make sure everything is straight and the way you want it and the last thing I want to do is actually take a smoothing plane to the octagon circles originally I was going to be rounding them out and I was going to use the card scraper to clean them up but because I have flat surfaces I found it easier to put it in the vise and then run along them with my smoothing plane a few passes on each of the eight faces and I end up with a really nice clean sharp surface that is it feels fantastic command and then you see I flipped it around because of all the grains running in other direction so it's just easier to flip the workpiece than it is to turn around and come from the other side I just want to go over and make sure that all the corners feel good is knocked to the corners off the octagon with a bit of sandpaper makes that just hold in the hand beautifully I just want to put a little bit of a taper on the end here to make it make it look a little better a good sharp chisel does this very quickly and I love the way these curls comes out just be careful when pulling the chisel back so you don't cut your finger on the edge of the blade and keeping it sharp is phenomenal this is the best way to get a good edge just to keep us drop on the bench and every now and then just come and give it 30 or 40 strokes and then you come back and it cuts yeah I love that these curls come off so cleanly and smoothly it's just happy and you get these beautiful curls coming out of oak which is not an easy wood to work with yeah that makes me happy if you can't tell now I've got that octagon on the end and I want to clean it off a little bit so the rasp actually doesn't really nice surface of that I thought you know let's make a good place for my logo to go and just put a little bit on the butt there so we're going to use my brand that I made a while ago and I've had a bunch of people ask me how did I make the brand and I actually had it 3d printed and so I want to do a video here soon about making that if that's something you'd like to see let me know it's a relatively simple process and you can get different places online they'll actually print it for you and then you can screw it in place and so I can heat it up put it on there and we've got our mark branded on there now we need to work on the the tip of this and it was a little bit rough so I just decided to cut a bit off of the end give myself a nice clean surface to glue - that way everything bonds a little bit better for the glue I'm going to be using barge if I had the time I was going to heat up some high glue but barges there and honestly I haven't seen much of a difference in strength between the two using a little bit of horse butt here and so I can mark off the circle a little larger than it needs to be then trim it down and get that ready to glue on as you can see here's the barge you put a little bit on the leather let that sit for a moment put a little bit on the tip push the two together then pull them apart and then let them sit for three to five minutes until they get tacky and then once they get tacky then you can put them together one of the big mistakes a lot of people put is that they put glue on soot on the - they put them on and then they tape it in place and it just doesn't hold as well so I've let them become a little bit tacky and now I can put it on there and it basically holds itself that really isn't a need for glue other than the fact that I there's a need for tape other than the fact I want to work with you here pretty soon so I'm just gonna hold it in place for another 15 20 minutes and then I can come back in and shave it off it really needs overnight to set to its strongest strength but for what I'm doing and I'm not actually going to be playing with it it is perfectly fine right now so I'm going to sheer it off tell it is flush with the outside and then come along around and taper the tip just a little bit and of course then it holds the truck happiness I love the smell of pool chalk that's yeah really good stuff oh I forgot to put finish on this oh yeah let's do that boiled linseed oil paste wax because this is something that's going to be in the hand it's gonna be sliding through the fingers I want that organic feel to it this is there's very few things that beat the feel of just a simple boil in soil and paste wax finish and it goes on so easily I have several videos covering how it goes on it brings out they the color and definition in oak just like nothing you know nothing else will come close to that and it feels phenomenal in the end so I wipe it on let it soak I'll put a couple coats of that on and then I'll come back with paste wax and buff that in and it is done it's ready to use let's have a little bit of fun and this is one of the most untrusted felts I've ever played on this epoxy poured floor is sad there you have it I am in love with this thing and I'm looking forward to actually going and playing a game with it and taking it to the pool on having people look at me and thinking what in the world is he doing lots of fun so there you have it a pool cute now all I need is a pool table I've got what three sets of balls and another half dozen cues as well as other things but I don't have a table one of these days we'll get one maybe I'll make a table that would make a good youtube video so let me know your thoughts down below I'd love to hear them I've thought about making this 2-part and cutting in half and putting a screw in either side but I really kind of like leaving it like this it's a little longer than normal and it's much heavier because I left the heft on this a lot larger but I kind of like the feel of it so it's something a little bit different off to play with it here soon so yeah let me know your thoughts I'd love to hear them down below please like comment subscribe that really does help out the channel I think that's about it for now until next time have a wonderful day so if you ever get in a line in England that's called queuing up

Channel: Wood By Wright How To

Views: 394,637

Keywords: wood By Wright 2, How to make a pool cue, Wood By Wright, woodworking, Handtools, Hand tool, Hand Tools, Hand plane, Hardwood, Hardwoods, Pool, Cue, billiards, how to, howto, how-to, traditional woodworking, hand tool woodworking, all hand tools, only hand tools, just hand tools, no talking, woodworking tools, chisels, woodworking project, handtool woodworking, woodworking projects, oak, hand tools woodworking, spoke shave, no lathe

Id: TUSuQwsJ8uk

Length: 13min 14sec (794 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 01 2019