Does anyone have any personal, first hand knowledge of rod breakage due to improper placement of guide relative to the blank(s) spine? Building my first rod and understand the conventional wisdom re: spine and guide placement but having a very hard time locating the spine on the tip section, even after lots of research and effort re same. No problem with the butt section (2 piece 8.5' IM6 5wt) At the very best, I can only make an educated guess on the tip section spine since it seems hardly discernable. Or maybe I'm just being overly cautious. Am I making a mountain out of a mole hill?
Would appreciate any comments on this with sincere thanks.
Bob

Give it your best shot and move on. Look back after you've built a dozen more and I think you will feel a lot more comfortable with it. Do the best you can and each one gets better and better, just comes with experience.

Have fun!

You cannot break a rod by improper spine orientation - there is simply no such thing.

What can and does break a rod, is using too few guides which creates a situation where the line pulls between the guides and places more stress on the blank in that area than it was designed to handle.

You can read more about rod spine on the FAQs page here.

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Robert,

It's funny you should mention this, there's a thread over on the Fly Fisherman bulletin board in which someone claims that ignoring spine is a major cause of breakage. I took the claim with a grain of salt.

Kevin

Severe twisting of a rod blank can damage it, but you have to remember that the spine cannot be used to stop rod twist while fighting a fish - only by having the guides on the bottom of the rod can you achieve that. All rods with guides on the top are inherently unstable. All rods with the guides on the bottom are inherently stable. And this would be true regardless of where you locate the spine.

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Some 20+ years ago I bought a low end Courtland fly rod that was not wrapped properly. You can roll the sections and feel that the spine is nowhere near where the guides have been wrapped. I still have it, my daughter learned to cast with it. For what I paid for it, it's been a great rod. The biggest drawback is that the tip rotates while it being used. Every 10 to 20 casts you have to put the tip back in line with the base. But it's never been broken, but it's caught a lot of fish.
Joe

Joe Luebeck
Butte, Montana



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/10/2005 05:53PM by Joe Luebeck.

Just a note to thank all who responded. Appreciate it.
Bob