I have a friend who is a custom rod builder and his work is really nice. However, he has a tendency on the larger weight rods - 7wt and above - to upsize the guides by one size. On a Sage 10' 8 weight blank that I have, he suggested upsizing the stripping guides as well, in fact replacing the last snake guide with a stripping guide making it with 3 stripping guides - 12-16-20.

Also, his guides are epoxied from one end of the wrap to the other, including under the eye and starting a bit up the eye as well encapsulating the entire section. His long lengths of epoxy are perfectly level and he truly makes a beautiful looking rod. I hate to offend him by inquiring on his reasoning for this, since it seems to go against the direction of many builders on this website.

I know he travels alot to Alaska for Salmon fishing and am thinking because of this heavy duty activity could be the reasoning for making things a bit more durable. He made my 9'6" 9wt this way (but only 2 stripping guides) plus added a fore grip as well (and I know I can only rest my hand on it and not reef on it real hard) and I don't think I could tell a difference if it was made with the smaller factory size recomendations or not! Any comments on this subject would be appreciated.

It's been discussed and I think he's just into the idea that larger stripping guides help clear knots. In my own experience if the knot doesn't hang in the first stripper it will surely hang in the second or third so what does it matter. It has to pass through the running guides and tip top at some point so a larger first guide doesn't make any difference.

I think a 20 is way too large on any fly rod even the large saltwater models. One thing I am switching to is using spinning style guides for strippers just to get the line farther away from the. I actually think that does help a bit. It took me a while to get used to the different look but I'm beginning to like it.

Tim, I have to respectfully disagree with William. I live near Anchorage, Alaska, and fish trout, salmon and steelhead. A lot of my casting is in the 60-80 foot range, sometimes longer, a lot of times shorter. I need performance in all ranges. I am all for upsizing guides on fly rods. In regards to weight on a Sage, I replace the snakes with single foot guides, so I'm losing that extra wrap on each of the running guides. For the Strippers, I upsize. Where you'll notice the difference in the bigger stripper is picking up and shooting a long line. If the only fishing you do is dink and dunk in a small stream, or close range finesse dry fly fishing, you have no reason to upsize. If, on the other hand, you're looking for a lot of distance and or big heavy streamers, sink tip lines or split shot, the larger strippers are nice. This is one reason saltwater guides are usually larger- look at the Sage Xi2's for instance. That sizing your friend suggested for the 8 weight is what I use on my rods. For a 6 wt I'll run either a 16, 12, some combination of 6 and 5's and finish with 4's depending on length and action. Two other considerations are stripping line and fighting fish. With a speed strip, line may have a tendency to hang up in a smaller stripper. When you have a hard running fish, i.e. saltwater and large salmon, line comes off the reel cleaner with the larger guides. Do a home deflection test: Tape all your guides on, tightly, and put a bend in the rod with your line through the guides. Notice how much pressure is put on the first stripper guide, and the angle the line is coming off the reel at. Regarding epoxy; the ends of each wrap should be sealed against the blank and guide; you want to be sure the guide foot's tunnel is filled in. If you see a guide wrap with no epoxy at the base of the foot, and you can feel lthe thread's texture, that wrap will fray with time and you may lose the guide. Also, especially with salt water use, the foot may not be sealed tightly, and you'll have rusting problems. For the length of wrap, I keep mine as short as possible. 3-4 turns of thread on the blank before jumping onto the foot, and my outside clear rings are only a couple brush bristles wide.

Well, that's my two cents worth. Like it or not, that's my opinion and I'm sticking to it! Any questions about fishing In the greatland, drop me a note. Its a long, slow winter!

Larger guides reduce casting distance. But you have to have the right sizes to begin with. Some rod guides are way to small. But I have never found any increase when moving from a 16 stripper to a 20. Now on the guides near the tip larger and heavier guides can really rob you of distance. Just go easy there and don't use anything larger than you really need.

Oversizing is just as bad as undersizing. Best idea is to use the correct sizes to begin with. That's as good as it gets.

Instead of the size 20 for a stripper,why not use a high frame style with a size 16(smaller ring size,but gets the line a bit further off the blank)?I have a couple of 8wt factory rods with size 20 strippers on them and they sure look large for a reletively light salt water rod.I would expect to see them on a 10wt for sure,but I'm not sure if there would be any benefit over a size 16(especially in the high frame) on a 8wt.

If I was building a 8wt(I recently did a 10ft 8wt myself) I would use a 16 high frame double foot,followed by a size 12 high frame double foot placed 4" up from the 16 as a line tamer(after a fair bit of tests I found I definitely prefer the line tamer on my higher line weight or rods where I will be shooting as much line as possible).After the line tamer I would then use either a size 10 double foot or size 10 single foot depending on what I was using for running guides.If I was dropping to snakes or wire single foot guides I would use the size 10 double foot(so I would only have 2 styles of guides on the rod and not 3) and if using all ceramics I would use a size 10 single foot instead of a double foot so I could save some weight and get down to the single foot guides as fast as possible.I've found dropping down to single foot guides immediately after the line tamer works just as well in regards to the benefits of the tamer guide,but shaves a little extra weight and the end result is a slightly lighter,more enjoyable rod(believe it or not,you can feel the difference between the 2 rods and even changing just one guide to a lighter one is noticable).

As far as using over sized running guides,I would only use running guides large enough to serve my purpose properly and no larger.Any larger than you need obviously adds weight and then starts to rob you of performance.Sometimes if I am using say a multi tip line with large loops I find that I do need slightly larger guides than what I would if I was simply using a straight fly line,so there are occations where going up a size with guides can help.I would rather have "slightly" larger than needed guides on a salt water rod than guides that catch my knots or loops(that could spell disaster) all the time.

Since going larger with guides increases weight and hurts performance,I would do whatever I could to counter act that by using single foot guides,or at least using the REC Recoils if using snakes.One could take that one step further by using either the REC Recoil single foot guides(you could probably go up one or two sizes in these if you had to and still have a guide that was as light or lighter than a standard wire guide) or Fugi Titanium framed guides.

On the thread wraps,your freinds method may not look the same as most,and the extra finish obviously does add some extra weight where not needed,but if the rod was going to be used heavily in salt water then I can see how his wraps would stand up to plenty of abuse and he's making sure there is nowhere that salt water can leak into(like when you forget to fill the tunnel under the guide foot).Finishing a guide like that probably takes less effort and is faster to do as well since you only have to get straight wrap edges on one side of each wrap instead of both sides.