I was just wondering what would be the recommended guide sizing for a 5 weight fly rod? I am new to building fly rods and need some advice. Thanks.

Tom, Need to know the length of the rod and if you want to use snakes or ceramic guides.

Hank
On The Rocks Fishing
Wells, ME.

I use ceramic single foot guides on all my fly rods. On 4, 5,& 6 wt rods a #12 df stripper, #8 sf, and #6 sf the rest of the way. I would sugges reading the Static Guide Placement article by Tom Kirkman in the library above, it is a great help in proper spacing of the guides. You can also use the the search option on this site.

Bob



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/29/2005 02:02PM by Bob Crook.

Hank, Sorry about that, they would be ceramic guides and the rod would be nine feet in lenght. I've built several spinning rods using the info on this site but never a fly rod. thanks, Tom.

Ok Tom - I think the info Bob gave should work for you

Hank
On The Rocks Fishing
Wells, ME.

Tom,

I've also found that by using the static placement method and test casting I have sometimes been able to decrease the total number of guides by one or even two. The test casting is important to make sure there is no slapping between guides.
Bob

I was in my local fly shop talking to their rod building guy the day before I started wrapping the guides on my rod. He gave me a prety good resource for guide size and spacing.

[www.sageflyfish.com]

Stop in your local fly shop and check out several different models of sage rods in the length and line weight of your blank and try to find one with similar characteristics, then find that rod on their site and print out the spacing chart.

I compared their spacing and the spacing I got from doing the static distribution test as outlined in Tom's book and found that with my particular blank the sage spacing worked great. It took me a really long time to get the guides spaced properly using the static distribution test only and they came out prety close to sage's recomendations anyway. If you really like the static distribution method, I would suggest using the sage chart to get you started and adjust from there. It will likely make things much quicker.

Mark