Tip diameter and hardness of tip

[riedmich]

More and more I 've made following experiences:

- Install a soft tip on a 13 mm shaft, it feels soft.

- Instal lthe same soft tip on a 12,4 mm shaft it feels medium (harder than on the 13 mm shaft).

Of course you cannot compare one shaft to another because of different woods, but the tendency of all may experiences goes clearly in that direction like told.

I made this experience only on a few shafts so i don't want to keep this as representative in mind, but i think about this phenomenon more and more. My explanation and understanding in the moment is like this: Under the same type of taper a 13 mm shaft tends to be stiffer and less flexible than a 12,4 mm shaft. While contacting to the cueball the 13 mm shaft flexes less and gives more power to the cueball - also because of the bigger endmass. For this reason the tip of the 13 mm shaft has to load more power than at the 12,4 mm shaft, with the result that the tip is compressed with a bigger force at the 13 mm shaft. For this reason i think the same tip tends to feel the harder the smaller the shaft diameter is and the more flexible a shaft is.

I would be very interested in the experts opinion / experience because my experimentations are still in progress and my aim is to produce milkduds and custom made mulitlayered tips in a more differented way than now.

 

[Cue Crazy]

I'm assuming that You started with the same size tip before installing them, but I'll put this other thought into the mix. Some brands of tips that I use frequently, I buy in boxes of different sizes, so as to cover most shaft diameters as closely as possible. I have noticed that some of the smaller sizes of the same brand tips play firmer then the larger diameter tips.

The reason I buy them in several sizes is so that I don't have to cut too deep to trim them flush with the ferrule, and farther away from the outer tanning. Some tips will turn to mush if you try to put too big of a tip on a smaller Ferrel, and then have to cut too much away. Some brands can handle that, but others I prefer to size them more closely.

 

[riedmich]

When I started replacing tips before 2 years I had in deed the situation that sometimes - at tips with small diameter - the tips had partly stronger mushrooming, but only when it were Lepro or other tips consisting out of one single Layer. At multilayered tips I had this small problem only with tiger emerald and Moori.

After some experience I started to precompress the tips after glueing them in a special way (but of course before the final shaping). And for pool tips bigger than 12 mm diameter I always reduce the thickness at the rim to not more than 4 mm (0.16 inch), for smaller than 12 mm diamater more to the direction to 3 mm. With these procedures I have clearly experienced that it doens't matter how much bigger a raw tip was to the ferrule diameter, mushrooming is only a matter of very thick and single layered tips, and here especially Lepro when you have a bad one. The procompressing of course does not make a hard tip out of a soft one, but it helps very much to have a very constant tip behaviour form the first hit on.

But what really seems to be is that at smaller diameters the same tip behaves more and more like a harder tip, and at bigger diameters the same tip feels more and more softer. In this experience I would be interested to share more information.

Yesterday again I made another interesting experience. For a friend of mine I installed a tiger Emerald on a carambolage cue (12 mm, for three-cushion). He asked me to let it as big as possible although I told him about the increasing danger of delamination with too thick multilayered ones. He said to me, hey Michael, that tip is too hard. I played a couple of hits and advised him to reduce the thickness a little bid, because the hit felt a little bit strange. After reducing it to round about 3.5 mm thickness it played much more defined and felt like we were used to for a 12 mm emerald.

It was not my first experience with multilayered tips that at big thickness they tend to feel some kind of harder an more undefined. But it is vice versa to single layered tips that feel more softer the bigger their thickness is. That undefined and harder feeling at the multilayered tips is a phenomenon that I cannot understand and explain clearly in the moment. I had this "strange" experience also at the very expensive Zan-Tip (medium), at Mooriquick and Kamui brown and black medium. I would be very interested in others explantions for this.

Thanks a lot, and have a nice weekend!
Michael

 

[riedmich]

No other experience? Where are the profs in tip questions?

Thanks