Several statements have been made recently disregarding the relevance of a guide (1st 180 of a spiraL wrap) being loaded when the rod is stressed. In the Angler's Resource catalog, Fuji's New Guide Concept (which doesn't advocate any more guides on their rods than this forum does) says;

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5. Greater Hooking Power
Hooking Power is affected by the number of guides on the rod. More guides aid in an increase of hooking power by keeping the line close to the rod. There is less power loss with the New Concept rod so your chances of setting the hook and landing that fish are greatly improved.

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And they show illustrations comparing the difference between a rod with both a sufficient and insufficient amout of guides - stating more guides "keeps the line close to the rod". So if a spiral wrapped rod (Simple/Bumper method) has it's 1st 180 guide that doesn't load until the rod is "deeply flexed" or not at all, how does this affect hook setting abilty? Thanks.

Very little if any.
Fuji is correct in what they are saying.
But the power difference is out towards the tip of the rod were there is a lot of flex or bend.

Further back their is not sufficient bend in the rod for a guide to make that much if any difference. The only time I could see that it might and I mean might is if you had a rod that flexed evenly form tip to butt.

Steve, I had a 50-80# Graphite Tuna blank break the first time I went to set teh drag. Teh sole reason that happened was when the rod went into a deep bend with 11#'s of drag, teh line lifted off the trans guide, and there was a spot about 13-14" which had no guide to support the load. The rod broke smakc dead center between teh 2 guides surrounding teh non loading guide.

I'm not getting into all this mess about all this stuff...teh fault is not with any system, it's with the person building the rod.

You could set the hook just as effectively with the line tied to the tip and no guides on the rod. This whole issue of "non loading" guides is really a non issue. There is nothing to to it.

The Simple Spiral rod sets the hook just fine - that's a proven fact. Don't buy into any more of this nonsense than you have to. It's gone beyond silly. You can argue that the world is flat all you want, but at this point in time, we're pretty sure it's roughly round.

I like Fuji products and really admire the advancements they've made in the component end of thing. But much of their marketing, is just that, marketing. They also have a section in there where they claim that using more guides makes the rod more sensitive. It doesn't. It's marketing.

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A #50 to #80 Tuna rod doesn't break because you had an unsupported section of 13 to 14 inches between guides. Most big game rods have butt and 2nd guides that are completely unloaded until the rod has been very deeply flexed. If a 13 to 14 inch section of "non support" was the issue, tens of thousands of IGFA trolling rods would be popping every time they hooked up with a fish. And we know that they don't. The same would be true of most cone-of-flight spinning rods built over the last 70 years, many if not most of which have several butt and mid area guides that don't load until the butt section has begun to flex fairly deeply.

It's very true that the greatest area of stress will be between any pair of guides, but 13 to 14 inches isn't a long area, particularly on the butt section of such a rod. There is no way that it broke because of the guide span there. We're not talking about high sticking a thin tip - we're talking about a very stout and powerful rod that would have been capable of handling its maximum amount of load if there were no guides on it at all.

Not that you claimed it was the wrap method's fault, but It failed for some other reason.


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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/02/2007 10:14PM by Tom Kirkman.

I'm not arguing and I don't want to upset or annoy anyone, but a long time ago I saw some slow-motion "tank" studies that seem to show that the first "bearing" guide back from the tip is actually the one that exerts the linear force on a hookset. Rarely is this the tip, because the tip flexes along the line and while it adds resistance it doesn't "snub" the line - at least in the films, anyway. I apologize for not being very good at describing this but the best I can do is to say, at least in the films, it looked like the guides one either side of the beginning of the arc of the rod (i.e., where the tip-section bend originates) are the guides that actually provide the pressure on the line.

If there were nothing on the rod but a tip, then indeed, the tip would be the only guide exerting any change in directin of the line from the reel to the fish and so, it would be the one that provides whatever pressure would be available to set the hook.

Maybe I should have just not said anything at all, but I thought this might help.

Uncle Russ
Calico Creek Rods

Tim, I don't know what's going on here but the Simple Spiral has been used by thousands, maybe tens of thousands of fishermen. It is proven to work. It won't twist, it won't break your rod, it will set your hook. I've made over 200 of these rods now and not a single customer has had any complaints. Most have come back and bought more.

You are worrying over a comment made by someone who popped up out of nowhere, with very little to zero rod building experience. Why put so much stock in his theory when it flies in the face of everything we know to be true?

Why don't you just build one and go out and fish with it and see for yourself if it works or not? Then you can forget all the silliness and get back to real rod building again.

Many years ago I heard about a spiral wrap method where you just offset the first or butt guide to the side a little. Maybe 10 o 15 degrees. Then the next guide was all the way underneath the rod about 165 to 170 degrees. It was also offset just enough so that coupled with the butt guide the line would pass between them and clear the blank. The first guide underneath the rod was completely unloaded until the blank had flexed WAY back towards the reel. Most times this took a lot of weight and-or pull. Until now I never really gave it much thought. But looking back, in all the rods I used this method on I have yet to have a single failure of any kind, outside of one instance where a rod was put on a rail and the force concentrated on the upper one half of the rod. I chalk that one up to fisherman abuse. Not much you can do about that.

When the Simple Spiral method came along I adopted that because it allowed me to keep that butt guide straight up. I didn't like having those guides offset although they seemed to work fine that way. So the Simple Spiral it was. In two years I've built and sold many dozens of rods made that way and every one of them works as well as it possibly could. No problems. Only success stories.

Sometimes it's like Bill says, you just need to build the damn rod and take it fishing. You'll know in a little while if it has any shortcomings or not. And you'll learn more from your own experience than anyone could ever tell you in a theory.

Seems like a legitimate question to me. Here are my two cents-

I don't know about the guide setup having much difference, I think the drag setting on the reel and the line used make the most important part of setting the hook (at least for freshwater bass). I'm sure I'm not the only one who has went fishing and goes to set the hook and forgot that I backed the drag down after my last trip and haven't remembered to retighten it. You know the rest, no fish and a birdsnest, lol. Or feel the difference in hooksetting using mono and then braid, it's a night and day difference.

Here is a simple test that will help demonstrate the difference that a few guides can make in harnessing the power of the blank especially during the hook set and why the “new Concept System is an improvement over the older style guide set-ups.

If you use a longer med to med/light rod or popping rod (with spooled reel attached) for this, the results will be a bit more exaggerated, but will help give you a better understanding as to the effects. Which are much less of an issue on shorter broom stick blanks.

First you will need to set up a device or system that will allow you to exactly duplicate raising the rod from a 3 o’clock or slightly less position to 12 o’clock.

An easy way to do this is to take a cardboard box and cut one side off, place on table or other elevated surface.

Lay rod with reel down in box, or reel up on spiral wrapped rod handle butted up against opposite side. This will allow you to raise the rod using the back edge of the box to be your 12 o’clock stop position.

Next let out about 30 ft of line and attach to some type of weight, enough to put a bend in about 30 to 50% of the blank. It also needs to be were it will pull along the ground with out rolling.

Reel line down to the point of putting tension on the weight but not enough to move it. Mark the weights starting point so you can put it back there for the second half of the experiment

Then raise the rod to the twelve o’clock position to move the weight forward. Lay the rood back down and mark the position of the weight.

Then untie the weight and pull the line back through the guides. Restring it so that you miss every other guide but through the tip (Example; Run through tip- miss second guide- run through third guide- miss fourth guide and so on)

Now repeat the exercise and note the difference in the weights location. It will be further back then it was with the line run through all the guides. The same results on a rod with fewer guides.

In my personal experience I have found that the difference of an extra guide or two, not only harnesses the power of the rod a little more on the hook set. It allows me to better utilize it through the entire fish catching experience. Making it easier fro me to better control the fish and land him sooner (which is not as important when your just fishing, but when I’m looking at a fish that may be worth $4,000.00 or 5,000.00 in a tournament. I want him in the boat as soon as possible.)
And some times it’s a benefit when fighting fish that tend to fight them selves to death when left on the hook to long (like strippers and red fish)

This thought process is one of the reasons I got so excited when working with Bill Batson on the tiny guides. It has allowed me to add an extra guide or two when needed, and still have a rod lighter at the tip then some one who used 6.mm type guides.

I've been building spiral wrapped rods for over 30+ years. All of mine are done in what we used to call the ROBERTS WRAP style as popularized by Joy Dunlap. Looking at about a half dozen of mine this morning I see that the line itself doesn't even begin hauling on the first 180 degree guide until you have a pretty decent bend in the rod. I guess this is what you are calling a non loading guide. So what? These rods and thousands of others like them all work just fine on bass to kings. I'll bet that more rods have been done in the Roberts Wrap style spiral than any other and they all have non loading first 180 guides and they all work fine and set the hook fine.

Nearly all spiral wrapped rods will have this supposed "non-loading" guide at the first 180 degree position. Whether you call it a Robert's Wrap or Revolver Wrap, O'Quinn, Zero Transition, Single 90, Simple Spiral, One Guide Transition, or any of the many other systems, all will have this "non-loaded" first 180 guide in many cases. But it would be wrong to assume that there is something wrong with all of them and that they aren't effective at setting a hook.

On the Simple Spiral, I've pointed out many times that you can use a lower framed or smaller guide at the first 180 guide position if you want the line to rest on the bottom of each guide ring prior to the rod being flexed. It won't make much if any difference, but if it makes you feel better, then do it. You can also employ this on any of the other spiral wrap methods as well. We went over this right here on this site about 3 years ago.

Some of the older implementations of the Roberts or Revolver style wraps employed a first 180 degree guide that was larger than the rest of the running guides. This exacerbates the whole "non-loading" of the first 180 degree to an even greater extent. But it has never been an issue nor caused any problems. The fact is, on the Simple Spiral this is even less of an issue than with most of the other systems where far too many guide sizes are often employed.

Now I'll go one better than that - take any of your regular casting rods with the guides wrapped on top. Most notably those that use a multiple of 3 or 4 various sizes, say something like, 16 - 12 - 10 - 10 - 8 - 8 - 8 - tiptop. Run a line through it and make it taut but do not flex the rod. You'll find that several of the guides there are "unloaded." That's right, even with all the guides wrapped on top, many of these rods have "unloaded" guides. But just like with the spiral wrapped rods, once you begin loading and flexing the rod, the line will seat in the guides.

Unless you have widely varying guide sizes/frame heights, this whole issue of "non-loaded" guides isn't an issue at all. And as stated previously, your rod is capable of its maximum lifting capacity with absolutely no guides on it at all. You can't very well fish it that way, but adding guides doesn't make it stronger or increase it's deadlift capacity.

There are all sorts of things you could do with guide sizing and spacing that could indeed be cause for concern, but within reason this isn't one of them.


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In the Clemens book Advanced Custom Rod Building Dale pushed the Cone of Flight system for spinning rods. All of these had several non loading guides until you put the rod into a very deep flex. We built them, fished them, and enjoyed them. They worked then and they work now. I'm sure better systems have come down the pike since he penned that book but I'm also sure that millions of these type rods are still out there setting the hook and catching fish.

Believe me, I'm not trying to cause any trouble - but when I see different opinions about a subject, I have to ask certain questions so I can sort things out and make the right decision. All I want to do is be assured I'm building a rod the best way possible. I'm sure everyone has their own quirks they incorporate into their building and I'm no exception. What annoys me is to build a rod a certain way and realize later I could have done something better. I built a 10 1/2' Batson this summer and wound up using a revolver wrap. Then I built a shorter rod using my "stupid spiral" method and am really happy with it. Now I'm thinking of rebuilding the revolver wrap rod over the winter but I'm not confident that I clean off the double foot guide wraps without it pulling some of the rod's finish off - FRUSTRATING!

No one is accusing you of causing trouble. Asking questions is what this board is for. What I and several others here are trying to assure you of is that the hook setting ability of your rod is not dependent on the first 180 guide and whether it "loads" or not. With a particular length rod, a certain type and size line, the ability to set the hook lies in your hands and your technique.

We all have different opinions. But some of those opinions (advice is what I think you're after) come from folks who have built hundreds and hundreds (even thousands) of rods while others come from folks who have built none, or just a few. That's the bane of internet message forums - you don't really know who it is that may be offering advice and how valid it may be. Now that's not to say that the number of rods someone has built is necessarily an indication that their advice is more apt to be correct (you can certainly do something wrong or very poorly rod after rod, year after year). But the level of experience behind the advice can often does count for something.


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Tim,

You're beating yourself up over this! There are many methods of spiral wraps out there and it's not a matter of "right" or "better". They all work fine! It's a matter of personal preference. If you're happy with the Revolver rod, why chage it?? It's not "wrong" or less effective than any other method. I use the Simple Spiral exclusively because I find it easier to set up configure on any size/type rod, NOT because I believe it's morew effective. I'm absolutely certain that there are MANY excellant spiral rods being built every day using many methods that are just as effective as the SS system. Asking questions/advice is fine but you have to take the resposes with a little grain of salt. Like Tom said, they are ALL opinions, usually based on the persons own (even if very limited) experience and often simply on baseless myths that have thrived in any hobby/craft. Read it all and absorb what you can, but when all is said and done, you have to depend on your own intuition.

Keep in mind that there is rarely a wrong way to do anything, the "Right" way is the one that works best for YOU!!!!!!!!!!!! I consider myself an average builder that loves what I do and freely offer help/advice and some people actually take it even though they have no way of knowing if I actually have any knowledge of what I'm talking about, which, according to my wife is usually the case!!
The Internet is pretty much a nameless/faceless medium (thankfully, Tom, at least requires a name instead of "handles") where anyone can be anything they want to be and say anything they they want and never have to prove there credentials or be held acoountable!!

Mike (Southgate, MI)
If I don't want to, I don't have to and nobody can make me (except my wife) cuz I'm RETIRED!!

My spiral wrap rods have guides set at 0, 60, 120 and 180 degrees over about 12" distance. I don't know if these are Roberts or Revolver rods. Doesn't really matter to me. I strung a line out and tied off and pulled. The first 180 guides don't load until the flex in the rod is back about halfway. A pretty good load by then. Have no idea if this is supposed to be good or bad but I've used them for many years and haven't had any problems with them at all.

Tim Collins Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Believe me, I'm not trying to cause any trouble -
> but when I see different opinions about a subject,
> I have to ask certain questions so I can sort
> things out and make the right decision. All I want
> to do is be assured I'm building a rod the best
> way possible. I'm sure everyone has their own
> quirks they incorporate into their building and
> I'm no exception. What annoys me is to build a rod
> a certain way and realize later I could have done
> something better. I built a 10 1/2' Batson this
> summer and wound up using a revolver wrap. Then I
> built a shorter rod using my "stupid spiral"
> method and am really happy with it. Now I'm
> thinking of rebuilding the revolver wrap rod over
> the winter but I'm not confident that I clean off
> the double foot guide wraps without it pulling
> some of the rod's finish off - FRUSTRATING!

TIM....

I have to ask you this, and I mean absolutley NO malice or have any bad inetent by it; but why in God's name would you re-wrap this rod when IT'S going to perform the same, realistically catch just as many fish, cast just as far, feel the same as it would if you re-wrapped it? Isn't this a being a bit anal-retentive? As you may know, re-wrapping a rod is a painful process, trust me. I

I understand where you're coming from when you say you could have done it better. But, you really have to ask yourself; What is better and in whos eyes? Maybe I'm missing your mark and like I said, I don't have malice or ill-intentions on this statement-just trying to why?

Take Care...
Paul

Tom Kirkman Wrote:
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> A #50 to #80 Tuna rod doesn't break because you had an unsupported section of 13 to 14 inches between guides.

OK, I made a mistake, as it was not 13-14" as I stated, it was actually 16". Here is the ORIGINAL thread which touched on this subject almost exactly 2 years ago. [www.rodbuilding.org]

Tom Kirkman Wrote:>

> As I said earlier, regardless of which method you prefer, you must still use enough guides to provide adequate stress distribution for the
> blank. If you have an area on the blank where not enough guides are used (or in Billy's case - where the line doesn't touch one of the guide rings)
> then the stress that occurs between that pair of guides could result in the blank taking a bend that it wouldn't otherwise take and failure can be
> the result.
>
> These type situations can nearly always be prevented by using more guides or sizing them so that the line makes contact and "pulls" on each
> guide that is used..

Now I really am totally confused.

If you'll do a bit more searching, you'll also find where I've said that this is almost always only a problem on the upper half of the rod because you'll force the rod into a flex that goes beyond 90 degrees. You'd never do that on the butt section of most rods - you'll never get them to flex that far.

16 inches between guides up on the top half might be a problem. But on the butt... not at all likely.

Even on the upper half, and certainly on the butt half section, it would take more than a "non-loading" guide to cause a problem because once the blank starts to flex, such guides will indeed "load." At that point, you have what is required (unless you're putting something like a #40 between two #6's). So what you'd really have to do, is just not have enough guides on there to begin with, and again, this would normally only be a problem farther up the rod.

The issue of RodMaker that went to press a week or so ago has this information along with photos depicting what happens with no guides, some guides (too few) and an adequate number of guides. Most will find it easier to view the scenario than to picture it in their minds. You will also be surprised at how much more load that a rod with no guides can support versus one with just a few guides can.

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