Tip Help

Tips

Here are a few resources that may help you:

http://www.pooldawg.com/article/pooldawg-library/the-ultimate-pool-cue-tip-guide

http://billiards.colostate.edu/threads/cue_tip.html#hardness_chart

As for myself, shot with a medium tip supplied by a local cuemaker for years; 2 years ago switched to a hard tip and after I got used to it my game improved immensely. Imo the only way you can tell what's right for you is to try many types of tip. The quickest way to do this is visit a local cue shop that may have several test cues/tips to try.

After using a hard tip I have difficulty going back now to a soft or even medium, the other benefit is a hard tip is there is a lot less maintenance, don't have to keep reshaping it as they don't mushroom like a softer tip over time.

My wife does the hardness testing

SpringsF6B said:

I have been playing pool for a very long time and this is the one area which escapes me. OK, one of many. I just don't use enough tips to have any feel for how one tip plays verses another. I'd say I play with a new tip once a year - and that includes tips on new shafts. To further confuse the issue the words 'soft', 'medium' and 'hard' appear to be marketing hype. A soft tip is only soft when compared to other tips from the same manufacturer and may actually be harder than another manufacturer's medium. So how can you make a decision as to what to get? I'd love to see a table or chart of tips currently being sold which shows some sort of hardness rating. In the absence of that what tips do you use? and why?

Click to expand...

Just don't get your hands to close..


So you type in (pool cue tip hardness rating charts ) click enter.
the results are this https://www.bing.com/search?q=pool+cue+tip+hardness+rating+charts&FORM=EDGENA

We cant decide for you, what one person may like another will not.

jimtauer said:

Here are a few resources that may help you:

http://www.pooldawg.com/article/pooldawg-library/the-ultimate-pool-cue-tip-guide

http://billiards.colostate.edu/threads/cue_tip.html#hardness_chart

As for myself, shot with a medium tip supplied by a local cuemaker for years; 2 years ago switched to a hard tip and after I got used to it my game improved immensely. Imo the only way you can tell what's right for you is to try many types of tip. The quickest way to do this is visit a local cue shop that may have several test cues/tips to try.

After using a hard tip I have difficulty going back now to a soft or even medium, the other benefit is a hard tip is there is a lot less maintenance, don't have to keep reshaping it as they don't mushroom like a softer tip over time.

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Those 2 examples contradict one another !!!

2twoball said:

Those 2 examples contradict one another !!!

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Pooldawg uses a Shore A durometer which is the wrong tool and scale for a tip... The tips have to be prepped properly before the Shore A has a chance and many/most tips will test at 100 out of the box...

The Colorado one uses results that were derived using a Shore D durometer.. The shore D has a different foot and more newtons of force/ Spring pressure... The added force means it works on brand new uninstalled tips and on tips after they have been installed and played with... A tip that tests at 70 new will still test at 70 installed as soon as the tip has been hit a few times and the fibers have been pressed down after the shaping....

The teller of the tale is actually the Samara... Phenolic should be at the benchmark max and should sit at 100 which it does on Shore D... Having a scale where the Samsara is a 95.5 leaves no room for any of the other Break/Jumps which are harder and faster but still softer than 100...

COR is another reason to use the Shore D.... The energy transfer of a tip is related to it's hardness... While not an absolute a tip that is around 70 Shore D in hardness likely will be some where between 67 and 74 in COR... A tip that measures 65 generally will be from 62-68 in COR..... Knowing a Shore D number gives you a ballpark of the COR to expect.....

SpringsF6B said:

That's kind of why I asked the question about people's preferences. I actually found a third chart on ebay http://www.ebay.com/gds/Pool-Cue-Tips-Hardness-Guide-and-what-works-/10000000023182381/g.html
this chart also is different from the first two. So much conflicting information make this very hard...

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It does make it very hard but it's all we have... Knowing that COR is related to hardness but not on an absolute level it only makes sense that hardness is only a ball park number... I can show you 3 tips that will test at 70 and because of the materials 1 will play as a soft... 1 as a medium and 1 as a hard....

The other thing that kills people is noone ever tells them how long a tip has been on a cue when they hit it.. It's not uncommon for me to have someone say I liked so and so's Super Soft and I get to say yeah that tip has been on there for 10 months and if they let me check it it will test much harder than a SS and the correlating COR will have increased as well but it happens daily so you only notice it when it gets replaced or becomes too hard for your preferences...

As far as what really makes a tip a Soft, Medium or Hard as far as play is COR... A player can feel the differences at about 5% So they could put tips in order of how they play from soft to hard as long as everything else was the same... A player would have zero shot at putting them into Durometer Hardness order if the tips were made by different companies or even the same company if they used different materials or processes....

SpringsF6B said:

That's kind of why I asked the question about people's preferences. I actually found a third chart on ebay http://www.ebay.com/gds/Pool-Cue-Tips-Hardness-Guide-and-what-works-/10000000023182381/g.html
this chart also is different from the first two. So much conflicting information make this very hard...

Additionally, this info is from the Colorado State site about Kamui tips;
(H. BROWN) 73.5; (M. BROWN) 71.0; (S. BROWN) 62.5;
(H. BLACK) 73.5; (M. BLACK) 72.5; (S. BLACK) 62.

Many people feel that a Kamui soft playes like most medium tips.
I'm having a hard time understanding this given the hardness rating of 62.

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One thing to consider is that Durometers have to be calibrated.. I send mine in every year so they do not get out of spec... I have never seen a S. Black test under a 64 but there could be a variance in some batches... Here is a shore D test on Youtube... In one of the Cuetips 1000 videos they discuss why Shore D is the proper scale over Shore A but not sure f it is this one..... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-EtC8SNIfY

just get a Ki-Tech medium and get on with your life.

You'r overthinking it... There might be differences between brand A and brand B's soft, medium and hard tips,but they all fall within a reasonable range, that separates a soft from a medium and a medium from a hard tip.
There might even be slight variations from one production run to another, within the same brand, how the tips are stored, is another factor that needs to be taken into account.
How the leather is processed also affects CB grip, chalk adhesion and how much the tip mushrooms.
You can't beat physics, so all of the characteristics of a tip is a balance of the leather, glue, and processing of the leather.

What hardness of tip you start out with will not be the same hardness of tip you will end up with at the end of it's life. Think of it this way, your tip is like a hammer and the tip is between the hammer and the anvil (cue ball). The longer you use the same tip, it will get harder as it gets compressed. After all, it is just a piece of leather.

Figure out what feels right to you and then figure out what tip performs best for you. One way to do this cheaply is to buy a few Ultraskin tips in differing hardness and experiment. They offer Ultraskins in H Hard, Hard, Medium, and, Soft as well as Super Soft (SS). Each tip has the harness rating so it should be easy to know which tip works for you best. They are great tips and inexpensive at around 2-3 dollars each + shipping.

SC02GTP said:

What hardness of tip you start out with will not be the same hardness of tip you will end up with at the end of it's life. Think of it this way, your tip is like a hammer and the tip is between the hammer and the anvil (cue ball). The longer you use the same tip, it will get harder as it gets compressed. After all, it is just a piece of leather.

Figure out what feels right to you and then figure out what tip performs best for you. One way to do this cheaply is to buy a few Ultraskin tips in differing hardness and experiment. They offer Ultraskins in H Hard, Hard, Medium, and, Soft as well as Super Soft (SS). Each tip has the harness rating so it should be easy to know which tip works for you best. They are great tips and inexpensive at around 2-3 dollars each + shipping.

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Actually quality tips change at a slower rate... G2 may take 2 months where Kamui takes 6 weeks to change grades... Fastest I have seen any tip harden up was 3 days and it was supposedly a Moori Jewel but there is no way to know if it was real........ PureX bricked inside of a week.....

A couple of years ago facing similar confusion and facing the loss of commercial availability for a tip I really liked, I plotted tip hardness ratings against each other for PoolDawg and Muellers. I know that PoolDawg uses Shore A and don't know how Muellers rates tip hardness. I believe that both companies are doing their best to help customers. The comparison just shows that you cannot rely on those numbers to pick out comparable tips between different companies. There is a modest correlation between their ratings, but not close enough for detailed comparisons. In many cases, my personal opinions do not qualitatively match the numbers provided by either distributor. I don't think there is an easier way to decide which tips you prefer than to test several and decide for yourself.

Sealegs50 said:

A couple of years ago facing similar confusion and facing the loss of commercial availability for a tip I really liked, I plotted tip hardness ratings against each other for PoolDawg and Muellers. I know that PoolDawg uses Shore A and don't know how Muellers rates tip hardness. I believe that both companies are doing their best to help customers. The comparison just shows that you cannot rely on those numbers to pick out comparable tips between different companies. There is a modest correlation between their ratings, but not close enough for detailed comparisons. In many cases, my personal opinions do not qualitatively match the numbers provided by either distributor. I don't think there is an easier way to decide which tips you prefer than to test several and decide for yourself.

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Awesome... Thank you for taking the time to provide the graph of your efforts..... Series 2 Matches my numbers fairly closely using Shore D....

SpringsF6B said:

I have been playing pool for a very long time and this is the one area which escapes me. OK, one of many. I just don't use enough tips to have any feel for how one tip plays verses another. I'd say I play with a new tip once a year - and that includes tips on new shafts. To further confuse the issue the words 'soft', 'medium' and 'hard' appear to be marketing hype. A soft tip is only soft when compared to other tips from the same manufacturer and may actually be harder than another manufacturer's medium. So how can you make a decision as to what to get? I'd love to see a table or chart of tips currently being sold which shows some sort of hardness rating. In the absence of that what tips do you use? and why?

Click to expand...

Hey Springs,go back old school. Until some space age material replaces LEATHER you have 5 choices,all non-layered.
Hard = WB,(water buffalo).
Med hard = LePro and Triangle.
Soft = Elk Master.
Now the best for last is an Elk Master soaked and pressed by Az member pooldawg8 and is called "milkdud". It's the absolute best tip I've used and I've wasted time/money on all the gimmicks. You'll need nothing else until leather is not the material for tips !!!
This post is MY OPINION... That being said I have not tried nor hit with Ki-tech from Outsville...

The Renfro said:

Series 2 Matches my numbers fairly closely using Shore D....

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Series 2 was from Muellers and Series 1 was PoolDawg. I should have provided that clarification in my previous post.