Hi guys,
I switched to a soft tip for my carom shaft with a 11mm tip recently. I was wondering if the tip shaper tools they sell for pool tips be ok to use since the tip diameter for pool is 14mm? What tip shaper tools do you guys use? Is Dime or Nickel radius better? I have also seen a Willards Cue shaper for snooker radius which must be closer to 11mm.
Dean
There are a lot of tools out there, that is for sure.
I use a Willard shaper for the initial shaping. I use the one with the dime radius. I used to think that the smaller radius gave me more english but that isn't really true. But what the dime radius does (or at least I think it does) is allow more precise placement on the tip on the cue ball.
My shafts both have 11.5 mm tips and I've never run onto a problem using various shaping tools other than mushroom trimmers, and that had to do with their design, IMO, not my tip diameter. I've also shaped using a plain emery board.
I think you will run into more issues on some of the other tools, like the ones that trim off mushrooming. I use a fairly hard layered tip so mushrooming hasn't been an issue, but once I tried one of the trimming tools and it marked my ferrule so I never used it again. Fortunately, as I said, with the tip I use mushrooming is not a problem. But if you are going to softer tip it could crop up for you.
The other place tip diameter comes into play would be burnishers. I WAS using the one that came with the metal 6-in-1 tool but I wasn't satisfied so I tried the Porper plastic burnisher, and that did a better job, But I think it was because of either the material (hard steel vs. softer plastic) or the angle of the interior cone, not anything to do with the tip diameter.
I'm curious, though as to what led you to try a softer tip? I'm planning to put a milk dud on one of my shafts to see how it plays, next time I see my cue guy.
