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ROLAINE Enterprises, Inc. primarily
deals in
high-quality Hard Maple (Acer
saccharum) products. We concentrate on primarily
Hard Maple because our core business is based in Wisconsin, which has one of the
highest-density forest growth regions for Sugar Maple.
Our hard
maple baseball bat company (RockBats.COM),
requires the processing of straight-grain and careful kiln dried, stress-relieved hard maple. Straight-grain hard maple that is not large
enough to make a baseball bat is processed into other high-quality
straight-grain maple blanks.
Cue Shaft Blanks.
One of the first things we did when
we started processing
pool cue shaft dowels was to develop
a QUANTITATIVE Grading System. This means you MEASURE
the grain on the blank, and this tells you what grade it is.
Over the years, we have developed a simple, yet
objective, grading system that provides the cue maker a clear
picture of the grain structure they can expect to receive when ordering
from us.
ROLAINE Pool Cue Shaft Grading System
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Pick the end with the
straighter grain, and follow the center growth
ring from that end, to the other end of the blank (30" of length). |
| Grade 1.
The center annual ring at one end remains near the center at the
other end. Not more than plus or minus 1/4" deviation from
the center. (nearly perfect) |
| Grade 2.
The center annual ring at one end deviates slightly more than
plus or minus 1/4" at the other end of the dowel, but less than
1/2" (No
Run-Off) |
| Grade 3.
The center annual ring at one end runs down the
center for about 1/2 the length, but then runs off the shaft.
When we process these into tapered shaft blanks, we locate the straight-grained
end on the narrow end of the final cue shaft. |
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Grade 4. The center
annual ring runs off the dowel right away. This is a low-grade
dowel based on grain structure. However, it is given a pool cue
dowel grade because it is PHYSICALLY STRAIGHT.
Physically-straight, bright-white maple dowels are still high-quality
dowels.
(if you ever browse the dowel bin at your local
hardware store or lumberyard, you will find that nearly all the dowels
are warped, and none are as bright white as those offered here)
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Grade 5. These are
dowels that are NOT physically straight. Their grain
structure may be grade 1 through grade 4 quality, and they are always
bright-white... but if they are not straight, they are lumped in this
final grade. Great for smaller lathe projects: chess men,
pen blanks, etc.
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Other Maple Blanks. On occasion, we
have other hard maple blanks available...
Pool Cue Butt Blanks. Rough-sawn
processed on a band-saw to 1.5"x1.5"x20". Primarily white
sapwood hard maple, with good straight-grain. Occasionally,
we find some material that has good curly or birdseye figure.
If we have it, we'll post it here - so check back often.
Coring Dowels. 1" diameter by 15"
long.
Availability of the various grades - an
explanation. When we first
started processing pool cue blanks in the 1990's, we heard cue
makers asking for maple shaft dowels with 30 rings per inch and higher.
Being a wood scientist, I wanted to get a good feel for the type
of availability to expect.
Below is a histogram we created after measuring hundreds
of dowels - this histogram shows the frequency of rings per inch that
one can expect when dealing with hard maple lumber.
Note that majority of dowels will be expected to have
between 8 to 15 rings per inch. And
less than 10% of all maple will have more than 20 rings
per inch.
Pricing
The
following table shows our price structure, based on rings per
inch and grade. Again, we emphasize, the entire matrix
shown below is not always available due to the rarity of the
highest ring counts, and due to the way we process the cue shaft
blanks. Baseball bats is our primary business, and the cue
blanks is a secondary process.
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Ring count |
Grade |
| 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
| 7-9 |
$10 |
$8 |
$6 |
$6 |
| 10-12 |
$14 |
$12 |
$8 |
$7 |
| 13-15 |
$18 |
$16 |
$10 |
$8 |
| 16-20 |
$22 |
$20 |
$12 |
$10 |
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20+ |
$30 |
$30 |
$20 |
$15 |
Shipping. We wrap our
shaft blanks in poly bags for moisture protection, and ship by
USPS Priority Mail. Large packages are sometimes more
economical to ship by UPS Ground.
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