personally I hate telescoping to shorten sections although technically it is a good idea from the rigidity point of view, but another argument is you don’t want a cup kit to be too rigid for your no3/no4 to handle otherwise you risk stressing them & potentially breaking a section

what I do is cut the no1 at the right length (so with the adapter & cup attached, the centre of the cup is the same as my top kits, so I know I’m always feeding bang on the money), then if the adapter dowsn’t fit the remaining tip diameter, which it probably won’t, I’d use a piece of the chopped tip to fit the adpater to & araldite it
then when that’s dry I cut that down to about 4″ of carbon from the base of the adapter & araldite this up the no1 section, creating a permanently fixed spigot

does that make sense

why not use the preston or garbolino ones that are adjustable and get the same length that way?

To be absolutely correct. If the cupping kit is too flexible as it bends it loses length. This means that only a poker straight (anyone ever seen a poker older than a couple of years that is dead straight?) would tip the bait right on the spot if cupping kit and top kits were identical.

Having said that, wind and tow affecting the bait presentation and tow acting on the bait cupped in meaning it reaches the bottom somewhere different anyway. At the end of the day it is probably only in in winter that we need bait to be on 5p piece. In the summer a shoal of bream or carp end up moving bait all over the place!

wildinguk, if the gap is substantial, I’d consider using part of the off-cut as a sleeve over the original 4″ bit, then spigot this up your no1

if the gap isn’t that big, padding it out with araldite will be fine, provided you let it dry properly before using it