Hey all,

A lot of times I read and have dealt with blanks that after being wrapped have softened up. I just finished a rod for someone who asked me to restore his rod. The guides neeeded to be replaced and re wrapped. To begin with the rod was pretty stiff. after I did the underwraps and finished wrapping the new guides the rod became even stiffer. What is the reason behind this? can underwraps make a rod stiffer? I am also working on a 6 foot tri-flex lamiglas light action rod that had a really fast action to it. After doing the underwraps and coating them lightly, it also now feels stiffer but in a good way. Could this be caused by the finish? I use Glass coat (which if any of you havent used is pretty awesome stuff! This has always interested me and I would love to know the techinical reasons why this happens to blanks.

thanks,

Art

Is it possible that you used lighter guides which in turn have less mass when flicking the rod, causing it to feel stiffer?

Mark Janeck
Custom Rods, Campbellville, Ontario

Mark has provided about the only possible scenario. Adding guides and thread never makes a rod more stiff, it always makes the rod less stiff, or softer. But you're not comparing to the naked blank - you're comparing against the previous rod with guides and wraps.

I can assure you that what you have now will act less stiff than the naked blank. It may act stiffer than what you started with, but if so it's because you managed to reduce the weight of the guides and wraps over what was there previously.

..................

I actually used the same exact guides as were the old ones. And the blank is definetly stiffer than it was before wrapped and with no guides one.

Unless you took a CC measurement, or some other objective measurement of stiffness, you are really just going by what you remember how the blank felt. Maybe you trust your recollection of such a subjective thing, but I wouldn't trust mine.

Arthur,
When you add wraps and guides to a blank you do not significantly affect the rods stiffness, power or action but what you do have a major effect on and what you may be interpreting as stiffness is actually the speed of the rods reaction to you shaking it. The addition of the guides and the wraps will significantly slow down the response of the finished rod. I think that some people have used the term you used, softness, to describe this.

Adding guides, even stiff ones, or underwraps, is not going to make the rod stiffer or react more quickly. Impossible. I wish you had run a CCS test on it, or the CCF while you had the bare blank and with what you have now. I have a feeling that your human senses are fooling you in this instance.

..............

Has anyone ever had a blank that has softened up after building? or are my spidey senses not working lol

Arthur,
I do not want to be picky about the semantics but I think that maybe you are using the wrong word. What happens is the weight of the guides and wraps lower the resonant frequency of the rod. The weight slows it down and it will feel less crisp, less responsive. It depends on the blank, how much the blank itself weighs and how powerful a blank it is, but the slowing down can be as much as 50% or even more on a lighter, lower powered blank even with small light weight guides.
Try temporarily adding a few extra guides near the tip, just with tape, and then give it the same shake test that you have been using. This will lower the resonant frequency even more and see if that does not make the effect that you are calling softer even more pronounced.
Tom did not mention this but there is going to be an article in Rodmaker, I think that Tom has it scheduled for the June issue, that covers this subject in a good deal more detail than is possible here.

Thanks everyone for thier input on this! I've built many rods before and its just none have become as less responsive as this one so I thought i would ask. once again thanks and I'll look foward to reading about it when i get teh issue

thanks guys

Maybe I'm reading you backwards - the rod should act or feel "softer" once you add guides to it. That's the natural course of events whenever you add weight, any weight, to a rod. And, the more of that weight that occurs near the tip, the more pronounced the effect will be.

.................