I have a question that I hope some of you could address for me. On a rod that has the guides, on a casting rod, located traditionally on the top of the blank, when loaded the line causes a force downward toward the blank. Now along comes a Spiral wrapped rod with the guides hanging on the bottom of the rod with the force from the line directed away from the blank. My question is, for rods being built for larger fish, do we now have to provide a second overwrap due to the different direction of force when we go to a spiral wrap design?

Thanks
Kerry

Kerry
On your conventional rod with the guides on top and when loaded it is a fallacy to think that the line causes a force downward toward the blank. The load actually creates a torsional effect on the rod due to the guide wanting to go to the bottom of the rod -- the load is pushing it there, and at the same time it is twisting the rod. It is a simple matter of lever arm physics. This torsional effect creates quite a load on the guide wraps. With the spiral wrap, there is no torsional effect, the guides start out on the bottom and are there when loaded, the same as a spinning rod. The end effect is, that the guide wraps experience less strain on the wraps than with a conventional guides on top rod.

Ralph

Ralph has built more rods and has expermented with every designed ever thought of besides being a rod finish expert #1.
Take Raphs word as gospil
Bob

Ralph

Thanks for the info on guide wrapping on spiral wrapped rods.

Kerry

I just built my first spiral wrapped rods, one is a 7' heavy boat type (30-50#) rod and one is a 11' surf rod. Both built out of solid glass blanks.

I attached a 114HLW with 50# line to the boat rod and tied it off to my testing eye bolt. I tightened down and put a really good bend in the rod gripping the grip portion, no rotation or effort to grip the rod. I then laid one finger of each hand under the blank above the grip and did the same thing. The rod did not rotate. This is probably a 6 or 7 pound outfit.

Did the same thing with the surf rod. Same result.

This will take a lot more experimentation as I still don't think that I have the guides properly spaced to get optimum performance. The next test will be casting the surf rod which I hope to do this week.

I have a lot more work to do on this method of wrapping as I think the basics of the wrap cover most all rods. The tweaking of the guide locations and offsets come with each individual rod.

The method has merit.

Yes, that's we've been saying for some time now. The spiral wrap has come and gone over the years but this time I think it will make greater inroads as custom rod builders are finally using it on more than just light duty bass casting rods or freshwater live bait rods.