In my "In Box"

From Mad Jake at Rings N Things II

Tom,

Happy New Year to you. I'm hoping all is well with you. It's taken quite a bit of engineering to fix these cups to where they are actually considered "right" or "improved". It was definately no design flaw on your part, just alot of manipulation of the bead and the mouth diameter. I've cut 13 pieces of tooling for this cup and I think we have it. First the cup will take 3 3/4" crochet balls on the saddle and will nest properly, if we push a bit on the blend of the wall we might even get 3 1" balls on top. The dress bead (center) was made more pronounced and moved to increase the attack space to achieve this. In addition we had to increase the size of the ID of the mouth to saddle blend, which now also allows, A]Stable Stacking B] 3 Balls on the saddle C] These will now hold a Tennis Ball with easy release. The cup weight per unit is now 5.8 vs the 3.5 oz of the orignal. This is the weight for a copper cup spun from 063 copper.

We of course have fixed the mouth bead so it it rolled closer to the cup so as not to collect dirt, this has also added to the stability of the stacking.

We are trying to find a source to have the boxes made as well as the ironwood wands.

The tooling that was used is cut from wood, as soon as I spin out a full set of final prototypes, I'll post them off to you asap to get your approval. I just need to finish up the Paul Fox Brass and Sisti brass cups this week and next. After you give your approval, I'll go ahead and have a magnesium tooling block and rollers made for the cup.

Just wanted to let you know we are working on these and I believe even after the wait you will be more than pleased with the end result.

Best
Jake