hello all

brother in laws girl friend has a 8' 5/6 wt that she wants to cut about a foot off of. says it is to long for her.
what will this do to the action of the rod? or would i be better off just to get her one the length she wants and build from scratch.

THANKS FOR ANY HELP YOU CAN GIVE

thanks for all of yalls help i kinda figured it would be better to build from scratch but wasnt sure
she is a novice and the place she fishes with it is small stream. thanks again to all of you for the help



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/26/2005 10:12PM by david williams.

I would build a new one. Cutting a foot from either the tip or butt will great alter the rod action, making it noticeably slower. Considering the prices of many quality blanks and components these days, you could build her a new one for what amounts to very little money.

..........

not that <<i>> need to second such a wise one's advice (;-) but i'd like to second the idea of building a new rod. what are you fishing for and what kind of environment? i built a fly rod for a member of the fairer sex and found there were a few aspects i could address which helped out a lot.

shorter rod (you've got that covered with the 8 footer). of course you could also go for a 7'-6" but that might pose a problem for her mending, if that's something important to your fishing technique.

different grip (i used a fenwick style for added comfort turned down a bit for slightly smaller grip size, although even a full wells works better than the typical grip found on off the shelf rods)

downlocking reel seat, cap and band for less weight.

and lighter line weight rated blank. 4 weight worked nice. thinner wall construction and smaller overall diameter also helped make a lighter overall weight rod for her comfort.

we typically fish small streams for trout in the sierra... and besides the smaller hand size, she also suffers from tendinitis on occasion. in the end, i REALLY like the feel of the fenwick style grips myself. why did they ever go out of style??? :-)

eric
fresno, ca.

Much better off starting with a new blank and building from scratch. And I just can't see how 8' can be too long for anybody that is seriously trying to fly fish anyway. In fact, I find it is much more difficult to cast and fish with shorter rods. Build her a 8' 4 wt from a modern, light blank with a grip fitted to her size and see how that works.

Cutting an entire foot off an 8' 5/6 wt. fly rod is likely to result in a pretty strange fly rod. I assume she's sort of a novice and a 7' rod is usually not that easy for a beginner to control line with. It could be that the weight of the rod she has is heavy or that she doesn't have it matched with the right line to get the basic mechanics of casting right. I wouldn't go shorter than 7'6" unless she only fishes very small water and definitely start with a new blank. Find out what line she will fish it with and then use the CCS database at the top left to help you choose a blank that will work well with that line and casting distance. For example, if she plans to fish a 5wt. line with average casts of 30' of line plus a leader, then look for something in the 5.0-5.5 range for ERN. There are many, many short fly rod blanks of excellent quality available for under $40 and stripping and rebuilding a rod is a lot of work that rarely makes sense.