Please check the information on this page carefully as following the suggestions on this page will ensure that you have a good experience with Talisman cue tips and that the tips will last you a long time.

Installing the Cue Tip

Generally we recommend taking your cue to a professional for tip installation. It does cost a bit more but a properly installed cue tip will last a long time with normal use and make the extra paid on installation worthwhile. If though you have experience in installing your own tips and will be installing your own Talisman tips please take a look at all the information on this page as we have had some reported problems with customers using certain tools to install their own tips.

Firstly if you are using a lathe or will be taking your cue to a repair guy with a lath please click here to see our installation suggestions sent in by one of our cue maker customers. This guy has installed many 100s of our tips. We suggest printing the suggestion page out and letting your repair guy take a look before installation. Click here for the suggestions page.

There are many different tools available that are used to install cue tips. Most of these were designed for use with single layer leather cue tips and there use with laminated cue tips such as Talisman can cause problems with delamination. Usually the tools do two or three different jobs. The first job is to trim the diameter of the tip down to the diameter of the ferrule. Our tips come in 14mm standard and will require trimming after fitting to most cues. For the most part we have had no problems reported using these tools to trim the tips diameter. The other job that a lot of these tools do is to shape the tip to the desired radius (nickel or dime). If you have a tool that does shaping and it uses "blades" for this job, then we strongly recommend not using this too shape Talisman cue tips. The angles of the blades can easily cause the tip to delaminate much in the same way you can peel an orange. For shaping the tip we recommend something like a Willard's tip shaper or an Ultimate Cue tip too (see below). These both use a dome shape with an abrasive material in the dome to shape the tip to the desired radius. Just hold the tool on the floor with your feet, with the shaft tip down in to the abrasive dome. The just twist the shaft in your palms. This should only take around 5 minutes or so.

We have had some reported problems related to the height of the installed tip. Generally we advise against leaving the tip too high. If the height is more than the diameter of the ferrule then its possible the tip will suffer damage and perhaps delamination near the ferrule. The best way I can explain this to describe a tall building in a high wind. A lot of force gets exerted at the foundations. Its the same with a high tip and playing extreme english. The sideways force can cause the layers to come apart or the leather layers to become spongy and loose. We make our tips with plenty of height so as to give plenty of tip to work with during installation. Be careful though of leaving them too tall.