Now, we've got our leader here and at the end of the leader we have what we call tippet and the tippet is the six x end of the leader The thinnest part of the leader
Now, these leaders come tapered and if you were to fish all day with the same leader, you would be cutting into that tippet as you change flies or get tangles or whatever, and pretty soon, you're going to run out of that six x and the leader is going to start to get thicker What you can do to rebuild your leader is to use tippet material, and the tippet material is going to have that same designation You can see here the six x diameter, but this is a spool of just that six x material, so I can take off a foot and a half, two feet, whatever I need and attach that to the end of my leader, to rebuild my leader On the other hand, if I had a heavier leader, say I was using a four x leader and I wanted to taper it down to a six x for smaller flies, what I could do is, on the end of that four x leader is put a foot or so of five x material, then I could attach my six x material to the end of that So, you can buy spools of tippet material that will allow you to use the same leader for a much longer period of time, or if you want to use the same leader for different applications, smaller flies, bigger flies
And tippet material will come in pretty much every size your leader will come in I usually carry two x, three x, four x, five x and six x and that usually covers just about any fresh water fishing situation I'm going to run into