How many times have you heard about a tile actually cracking from a whip though? I run a whip on every flue I can reach with it and have for about six years now. Put it this way, if the tile is so thin that a nylon whip takes it out, that flue was already gone and a rod brush would have finished it off the next sweep anyway. The guys saying whips are for lazy workers are mostly the same guys who take two hours to do a cleaning and charge for it. I still keep rods on the truck for the nasty tar jobs and for anything the whip can't reach, but for a standard 40 foot run that whip is just faster and the tile does not care either way. I did crack one tile once, but it was already spalled from a chimney fire years before and it fell apart if you looked at it wrong.

Man, you gotta stretch in sections and let the kicker do the rest.