Hello Everybody,

I'm looking at finishing up a Dropshot rod and might be using braid on it and planned on wrapping Fuji Alconite Guides on it.

Will the Fuji Alconite Guides hold up to the Braid without damaging the guides or grooving the inserts?

What guides do you recommend to wrap on a rod that is going to be used with braid?

Thank You and Happy Holidays,
Tony

All today's ceramics are fine with braided line. Alconites will give you good performance for the money.

Read Bill's post below.
He had asked me to post it, because he temporally could not log on then was able to about the same time I posted his comments. So I removed the post.

But I would also consider the use of 3mm’s an option for the running guides.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/19/2008 08:03AM by Steve Gardner.

Rig the drop shot rod with a guide system using a micro guide set up. The rings in the Alps, Batson and Fuji running 3.5 micros will handle braid quite well. Take a look at the guide sizing reccommended for spinning rods in Volume 4 of the M&M thread. Utilize all presented concepts to lower the weight of the total weight added to the blank and you will build a very good drop shot rod.

Tony,
Like bill said all of todays ceramic guides will hold up to braid. Especially in the finesse application you are looking at. I would suggest however that you tie about a 12-15' leader of florocarbon w/ a blood or uni knot to the end of that braid, and then tie your dropshot rig on that. I have my spinning reels setup that way. I like it because I don't ever have to worry about line twist on my main line, but I still have the section of floro for the reduced line visibility. ESPECIALLY important on a drop shot rig.

Now, if you do that you might want to think about going no smaller than a 4 or 5 ring. I have a dropshot rod setup with 16, 8, 6, 3 to the tip Batson's and the line setup I mentioned above. The guide's will pass the knot, especially since a dropshot isn't going for distance, but I havent fished the rod long enough to determine if there will be any extra wear on the knot. Mike Harris was using a similar setup, although with much heavier line, and he destroyed an insert of a Fuji micro I belive. But again, he was using heavy braid tied to a leader.

Scott Sheets
www.smsrods.com

As Scott said. This also helps if you get hung up on something, the leader breaks and you get all your line back.

I've completely stopped using the Fuji Alconites because I had too many ring failures. I never had a problem with braid grooving them, just them popping out.