TIPS. DOES A SOFT TIP GRAB THE BALL

TIPS. DOES A SOFT TIP GRAB THE BALL

3 pages 6-15-04, rev 1-13-05, published in dc, bpn, czm, upp, ppt , flp, btt.

Trust me, it’s true, just go hard and you’re fine. You have to get out of your brain this thing that the soft tip grabs the ball; it does not grab as you think it does.

There is no time to grab. The Jacksonville experiment using the world’s fastest camera proved that upon impact the cue ball is gone in 1000th of a second. Actung, Actung, there is no grab. Where is the time to grab, answer, there is no time, therefore there is no grab, there is no grab, tattoo that inside your eye lids. You have to bitch slap people to get them to accept this.

I was playing with a Champion red felt backed medium soft tip by Chan divert at the time because I wanted my tip to grab. I did not know.

I remember going into the Schuler custome cue factory in Chicago and Ray explaining to me the Triangle, which is very hard, and Ray saying I am going to put on a Morri on your shaft, on your back up shaft I will install a triangle. Now go shoot with both, and you will find the performance very close. The morri will last longer, but the cost is 50 cents compared to 20 bucks. I did, Ray was right, damn I said, hard is better.

I was practicing my Masses and Ray was teaching me many European Billiard Masses I could adapt to the pool table. He also taught me the European method of shooting these. He handed me a shaft to use for the masses and I said what tip does it have on it, he said triangle. I went oh no, I can't use that, I am using an elk master so I can grab the ball, this damn grab thing was still in my head, I could not get rid of it, it will hold on like some disease you can never get free of.

Ray said hit the triangle and I kept Miss Cueing saying see, I told you so it won't grab. Ray said keep shooting; you will learn the new hit and feel. Once I got past the fear of the miss cue, he was right, the harder tip, produced much more spin, power and curves, I was speechless, totally shocked beyond words, to have what I knew, to now be reversed on me and proven what I knew to be fact, was in fact dead ass wrong. The miss cues went away and my power went through the roof.

I am really from Missouri, the show me state, so I got every tip I would find which 28 I think was and spent months testing every one in a variety of shots to see which one gave me the most performance. I did follows, draws, you name it and I was shooting it. What I found was this, a soft tip does nothing well, the softer the tip, the less performance you get. The harder the tip, the greater performance.
All soft tips do is mushroom and wear out fast. A good hard tip can stay on for over a year. A triangle will never mushroom, never. I am so pig headed; I had to spend 2 months proving to my self, what Ray had already told me. I just could not believe my eyes, that was the problem with me.

I was using the backed soft tip because of my ivory ferrule to soften the hit. Put a triangle on an ivory ferrule and the hit is like a rock. Ray convinced me to drop my ivory ferrules because of the huge deflections and go hard and with triangle across the board. He put me in the billiard short ferrules for added strength. My performance and consistency sky rocketed. Most of my world records came out of this.

Here's the deal, a tip is like a trampoline, if its real soft, it caves in, crushes down, collapses on the hit and the ball then propels off with much less power.
The softer tip is killing the action off of the ball by absorbing the impact of the hit. Throw a baseball into a cement wall and watch it come back, now toss the ball into a rubber drape over the wall and watch it absorb the impact and comes off with less power, which is your answer to your question you first asked.

The triangle is firm and hard and does not do any of this, and it propels the ball off with greater spin and power.
The harder the tip, the better it draws, but you can cross a line on hardness where the tip can do some amazing things, but you can't hold chalk well and using English you are going to miss cue some, this I can not live with. More is not always better here.

Most of the water buffalos out there now are over the line. Triangle is right on the line, the top end of hardiness you can handle. I call it the poor mans Morri.

Tweeten makes most of the tips that have been played with and they do not want you to know what the hardness of them are, they keep that secret. Here it is, the entire line is mostly soft tips. Why, say you were making all the tires for cars and they only got 10,000 miles but people had signed off on that, need a soft tire to hold the road. Why then would you come along and make a hard tire that would out perform the old tire and give people 50,000 miles of wear. You just drastically reduced your annual profits that are your answer. That is why the soft tip was pushed on you. They push and sell an inferior product on you for their own corporate greed. That is why they always hid what the hardness of each one was; they did not want you to know.

This little Jap sitting in his apartment comes up with a very hard tip when the pro world was on Lepros, a med tip and elk masters, a soft tip, his name was Morri. He did not have a friggen clue what a corporation was, he just wanted to make a tip that played well. A few pros try them, the performance astounds them and the tip almost over night becomes the one of choice on tour. It spreads by word of mouth like wild fire.

The old dogs, the over the hill crowd stayed with their ivory ferrules and soft tips. You can’t teach old dogs new tricks. Soon the amateur world got wind of this, and hard tips were now in.

I recently did the same experiments I did in single layered tips against all the multilayer stuff out there today. I do not like any of the water buffalos, too hard. In the pig skin, Talisman out played and out performed the Morri hands down.

They come in s,m,h,x and break tips which are as hard as they can make them. I have them all in stock.

I play with the H, most club players should begin with the s, learn it and try and move up slowly to the M. I break with the X; I use the x for my artistic draw shots. The s follows the ball best on my force follows.

Hard is good, soft is bad, that is all you have to know.

I can sell you the Triangles which are pressed which increases their performance, or the Talisman pig skins, I have all 5 in stock, just email me at fastlarry@bellsouth.net

THE POWER SOURCE POOL SCHOOL “Fast Larry” Guninger
web site www.fastlarrypool.com
POOL LESSONS FROM A MASTER LEVEL INSTRUCTOR AND WORLD CHAMPION. 770-381-6609, fax 770-381-1916
POOL QUESTIONS ANSWERED AND FREE INSTRUCTION IS ON
www.billiards-pool.net In the ask the pros forum.
“Fast Larry” Guninger and Wonder Dog, trick shot shows and entertainment.
Email fastlarry@bellsouth.net fast larry at bell south dot net

May God bless and peace be with you. May there now be peace between us. If you are a real pool player, then fast truly loves you. May the wind be always on your back and all 9 balls fall.
VENI VIDI VICI, OMNIA VINCIT AMOR. “Fastus Maximus. “ Latin for “I came, I saw, I conquered, love conquerors all. Yes I really did do it all and you can believe it, or not. If you don’t believe it, C’est La Vie. " Shoot straight, innovate, never give up, just run out on the other guy then there is no way for you to lose. "Winners make things happen. Losers let things happen

You know, its kinda funny.....

When i grew up (or aged through adolescence--depending on your definition of growing up) nobody gave a hoot about what kind of tip one had (or did not have). A pool cue was servicable or not. After thinking about "growing up" playing pool for the last year or so, I can't remember shaping or needing to shape a single tip that might have 3,000+ hours of play on it. The only time I ever shaped a tip was when the previous one had come off and a new one was glued to the shaft. The only reason we did not re-glue the old tip was getting the tip and shaft concentric.

Durring this time (late 1960s) I had no trouble with greater than table length draw, force follows, gentle and medium massés once I learned how not to miscue and how to stroke smoothly through the ball at impact. By inspection of this equiptment in the modern period (last year) It is clear that these tips were quite hard, and are still in playing shape today (given that the shaft is still playable).

I was away from pool for about 35 years, and apparently a bunch of people invented a bunch of new kinds of tips and mad so many claims that it is impossible to use the net as a knowledge-base and arrive at a reasonable conclusion. But the bottom line is that the tip does nothing more than deform to create an area where the chalk crystals can grip the leather and the cue ball at the same instant in time. A really soft tip can deform so much that the chalk crystals are under-loaded and do not grip the cue ball--miscue. At the other end, if a tip is so hard that it does not deform, the chalk crystals will turn into powder and not grip the ball either--another miscue.

I have no idea where the practical limits are, however, I am now playing with a Talisman H and find no particular fault with the tip. It does not loose its shape, miscue, delaminate, wear out, glaze over, holds chalk rather well, and just flat out performs.

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