Coping joints

[doncaruana]

My vinyl pool was just built last year and I just noticed something about the copping. The joints between pieces and on one side of the stairs have these little sleeves on them. But I noticed that there is one joint with no sleeve and also on the other side of the stairs there is no sleeve. Aesthetically, it looks crappy by the stairs but I'm not sure anyone else would notice. But my question is whether these "sleeves" serve any other purpose than aesthetics and whether this should bother me any more than not being "pretty".

Here's a pic of one of the joints:
[attachment=0:a57yt9rd]IMG_3423.jpg[/attachment:a57yt9rd]

 

[dpannell]

The sleeves are for aesthetics. There should be no structural issues if some are missing. It looks like a nice pool, enjoy the summer.

 

[Ironchef]

How did you add the pic to your post?

 

[doncaruana]

How did you add the pic to your post?

Had to take the pic and shrink it to under 250KB first (I use outlook to do this actually). Then I "attached" the pic to the post. Once I did that, it gave me an option to add it inline.