Our Story

🛠️ Proper cues built by a bald bloke with a belly.

🎱 It all began, as most great stories do, with a small boy, a big table, and a milk crate.

At the tender age of eight, I discovered snooker. Or rather, I discovered that I couldn’t actually see over the table without standing on something. So there I was — pint-sized, perched on a plastic milk crate 🥛, cue in hand, eyes barely level with the baize, trying to pot reds like a miniature Alex Higgins with vertigo.

I wasn’t great. In fact, I was never great. My cueing action had all the grace of a startled giraffe 🦒, and my eyesight was more “guess and hope” than “line and pot.” Worse still, I hated losing 😤. Absolutely loathed it. Which, as you can imagine, made for a fairly miserable time when playing a game that requires precision, patience, and a Zen-like calm I did not possess.

Luckily, salvation came in the form of a similar game — one played on smaller tables, with bigger pockets, and most importantly, in pubs 🍻. Pool. A game where you could drown your sorrows after a missed black with a pint of bitter and a packet of pork scratchings. A game where tantrums were tolerated, and occasionally applauded 👏.

And it turned out… I wasn’t completely awful. I played competitively for over 20 years. Entered the county pool trials seven times — and lost seven times 🫣. At least I was consistent.

Somewhere along the way, I started collecting antique snooker cues 🪵. Not casually. Obsessively. I bought and sold over 400 of them, each one a little time capsule of craftsmanship. I learned what made a good cue — the balance, the taper, the feel. But knowing what makes a good cue is very different from knowing how to make one.

Then came 2020. Lockdown. The pubs were shut 🚪, the cues were gathering dust, and I was in danger of becoming a full-time sofa ornament 🛋️. Drinking alone lost its charm, and the waistband on my jeans began to protest. So I did what any rational man would do in the face of boredom and creeping obesity: I took up cue making 🪚.

Armed with a lathe, a playlist that mostly involves bopping away to the Vengaboys 🚌💃, and a healthy disregard for my own fingers, I began crafting cues. I’ve been making — and occasionally breaking — them ever since. Some were disasters 💥. Some were decent 👍. And a few… well, a few turned out pretty damn good 😎. You can check out the gallery and judge for yourself — and if you think they’re rubbish, that’s alright. Not everyone’s blessed with taste..

I now have a mortgage to fund tools and machinery, and more wood stacked up than the Amazon rainforest 🌳💸. But hey — it beats drinking alone.

And that’s how it all began.