The primer in the library doesn't mention the 27X; I believe that is a development since the primer. I am laying out a rod and will use the 27x, but another question keeps bugging me and I could use some advice. The primer runs a straight line from the reel spool centerline to the tops of the guides leading to small guides. Why would it not be more efficient for line flow to have a straght line from the centerline of the reel spool through the centerline of the guide eyes? This makes a significant difference in guide selection-going through the centerline will require taller guides.

I have done rods both ways, and while I have not done rigorous casting distance tests between the two, I sort of feel the centerline method may be better.

The line can't pass through the center of the rings - gravity ensures that it will always run along the ring of the guide. So setting up with your alignment line through the center of the rings only means that you end up using larger guides which gain you nothing in practical use and adds unnecessary weight which can indeed reduce overall rod performance.

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Michael,i am new to this so keep in mind what i think is pure thinking and maybe not true.when you use the 27x method,that is for giving you a pretty good handle on where to set your choker guide.with this method you won't use the center line of the spool to set the butt guide.i think you will use a butt guide that is equal to 1/2 the spool face diameter.set your guides from the choker toward the reel with an eye on good stress.you may have to experiment with guide height to get what you want in a particular rod.i have built a couple of rods this way and it worked for me.like i said before,i am also new so keep this in mind.some more builders that know exactly how to do it will give you more help.Jim Gregory.

I think the original Fuji NGC was based on the line running through the center of the rings. The trouble I had was in finding guides tall enough to allow me to do it that way. In many cases the height needed was off the chart, so to speak. So you had to go to unusually large guide rings just to get the height you needed. Like Tom said, the line is going to run along the bottoms of the rings anyway due to gravity.

One key to the NGC IMO is in quickly controlling and reducing the line coils but not over-controlling them. Too large is not good and unneeded, but too small or too quick a reduction can be equally bad. I think what we have in the 27X method is something that is the best of all worlds for the widest variation in lines, reels, and blanks.

One quick note- I had taken a bunch of my reels and plotted the spool upsweep in degrees and how far out it would hit the rod based on use of a size 20 reel seat. Then matched it to spool diameter and did the reverse math. The average distance was 27.2 times the spool diameter. Coincidence?

Thanks, guys, appreciate your comments and expertise. I'm interested in hearing from the people who have posted here in the past about how the line goes off the reel and through the guides. Since it is a pretty dynamic process, I feel a little uneasy in believing that the line sags due to gravity rather than contacting the first guide all around its circumference due to the inertia of the fast moving line. But, if I knew all the answers, I wouldn't have to ask. And admittedly, I have no data, just an imprecise observation that through the middle works better.

If off the top is better, or no worse, it does make guide selection easier and leads to smaller guides as mentioned above, so I do appreciate the possible tradeoff.

Dynamic may not be the best choice of words - how about CHAOS!

After you take a look at the picture in the following link you may change your opinion -

Tom take a look at the picture closely - at that instant the line was in contact with the outside edge of the ring - do you think that the point of contact of line and ring would circulate around the ring as a function of instaneous time intervals due to the wave form shift?

[www.rodbuilding.org]

Mike,

By the time the line has gone through the first 2 guides, if it's still traveling in a circle, you need to go back to the drawing board and redo your guide set-up. Higher frames and smaller rings generally straighten the line out more quickly than lower frames and larger rings.

If I were you I'd to this - set up 2 systems, on the same blank, one at a time. Set the choker and running guides the same on both. But on the first one, set it up just like the article suggests using the outer edge of the guides on the line path. Now go cast that 50 times and record your average distance. Have a buddy cast it 50 times if you have someone there willing to help, and record his average distance. Now go back and remove the butt and transition guides. Size and set the new guides so that the line path passes right through the center of them rather than along the outer edge of them. Now go back out and repeat those 50 casts and record the average. Have your buddy do the same. Now compare the 2 and see which has performed better. Use the one that you feel serves your requirements the best.

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Bill,

Most likely the line in that scenario does not revolve around the ring and you certainly wouldn't want it to do so. You want it to get straight as soon as possible. The better set ups have the line only touching the bottom of the ring at that point. But I don't worry too much about still photographs - where the lure lands is the more important issue.

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Michael, If you use a VERY large butt guide like the old surf rods used to do you might be able to get the line to move in a complete circle inside the butt guide for a second or two then gravity is going to take over. But I think that defeats the purpose of what the NGC concept is all about and can cause line slap on the rod. The reason spincast reels cast so well is due to the fact that the line gets controlled as soon as it leaves the reel cover opening and is moving straight out ahead instead of in a circle.

Its hard for me to really see what the line is doing for more than a second as I cast and try to hold the rod out so I can really watch it. But it looks to me that with the way I have set mine up the line comes off the reel in coils but as soon as it touches that outer edge of the butt guide it seems to hang right there. I put some powder all around the inside of the butt guide just a bit ago on a rod I have and cast it to see where the powder was disturbed. Its hard to tell and powder is not the best thing to do this with but I do not think the line is making contact all around the butt guide. The bottom middle one-third maybe. I need to get something better than powder and try this again though.

One last thing.......when you say "I have observed" are you talking about something you observed while casting or something you observe just thinking and looking at your lay out?

Bill Stevens Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Dynamic may not be the best choice of words - how
> about CHAOS!
>
> After you take a look at the picture in the
> following link you may change your opinion -
>
> Tom take a look at the picture closely - at that
> instant the line was in contact with the outside
> edge of the ring - do you think that the point of
> contact of line and ring would circulate around
> the ring as a function of instaneous time
> intervals due to the wave form shift?
>

Bill, how long is this rod and how many transition guides are actually on it? Thanks.
> [www.rodbuilding.org]
> /photo/7809

The rod in the Bill's photo has one butt guide and two transition guides, then the choker and running guides. You can see the full movement of the line even in the single frame photo by means of the ghosting image of the line movement. The line appears to be only on the bottom of the butt guide but hitting the rod between the last transition guide and the choker guide. I would have built it with one more transition guide and the butt guide a little closer to the reel which I believe would better straighten and control the line, but I'm not sure anything would really change in terms of casting ease or distance. But since the only added weight from one more guide would have been back behind the rod's center point that's how I would have done it.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/30/2009 05:32PM by Peter Sprague.

Good comments folks, and good test suggestion, Tom. Ken, "what I have observed" refers to a rod I recently built that I did a little test casting on, not a rigorous study like Tom suggests, but some test casting with different setups. If it makes any difference, it is a 7 1/2 foot spinning rod made on a 3 wt fly blank with 3 transition guides (27x) and micros as running guides, designed for a Shimano 500 size reel and using 8 # braid (which was dry when test casted-I also wonder what the effect of water on braid is, (increased mass) but for another time). It was built centerline and casts like a bullet (heard that before?). I had to use a different third transition guide from the Fugi BYAG's I used on the first two in order to get the third guide low enough.

Ken, using powder to determine the contact with the guide seems like a pretty good idea. Might not result in longer casts, but it seems like it would answer the question about line contact with the guide.

Peter, the Stevens pic does show the line at the bottom of the first guide, but that pic tells where the line is for only an instant. The ghosting is the distance the line traveled while the shutter was open, a shutter speed that may have been pretty fast. Where the line was a few miliseconds after this pic is not answered by the pic. I'll bet that it rotates around the full periphery of the guide.

Obviously, the best answer to finding the best casting rod is as Tom suggests, and I'll do that. But being a curious retired engineer who likes to know how things are happening, and having a pretty fair understanding of the accelarations that must be going on with the line coming off the reel, I think the accelarations on the line are far greater than gravity. At least for the first guide. The real question I have is not whether a bigger guide set centerline is better than a smaller guide set with top alignment, but is whether the same guide set high (centerline) is better than low (top contact alignment). (With respect to the theroetical straight line path between the centerline of the reel spool and the centerline of the first running guide set 27x away) It could be that the first guide should be aligned for centerline alignment and others for top alignment. After the line gets "tamed" by the first guide, the deflections of the line are so much smaller that the accelarations are much smaller also and gravity could indeed have a much higher influence on the actual line path.

thanks again. Keeps the cerebral juices flowing, right?

Tom I can't resist one more comment: Regarding "The better set ups have the line only touching the bottom of the ring at that point. But I don't worry too much about still photographs - where the lure lands is the more important issue."

How do you know the line is touching only at the bottom of the ring? Actually, not just theoretically.
thanks for indulging me.

Michael,

Just look at it. It's not that hard to see.

The photo Bill provided shows the line in the bottom of the ring - I can pretty much assure you that it stays right there - it's not revolving around the entire circumference of the ring. But keep testing for yourself - you can learn a lot by trying different guide combinations and noting both the distance and line behavior from one set up to the next. What you'll end up finding most remarkable, is that the set up that provides the smoothest and quietest line flow may not be the one that provides the most distance.

...........

I agree the line is at the bottom of the butt guide and it also appears to be coming off the bottom side of the spool. One would think if there were more photos just after this one was taken, the line would seen be coming off the top of the spool after the next half revolution . And right in front of the butt guide, the line is arched upward and in a few micro-seconds, I would think that line coil would be hitting the top of the ring. It would be hard to imagine that the line is going to be able to suddenly dive downward to the bottom side of the ring when it's that close headed in the direction shown - but maybe I'm missing something.

Looking at the photo, IMO that rod needs at least one more guide. Not sure it would really make any difference in distance but it would control the line better. I would also add one more transition guide and slip the butt guide back just a tad towards the reel.

We were typing at the same time. It really would not matter if the line is coming off the top or bottom of the reel spool. The bottom of the guide ring is going to be higher than either the top or the bottom of the reel spool and so the line should remain on the bottom of the guide ring. At least it does on my rigs.

This is a great discussion. Michael, you ask the exact question I've been wondering about. Quite a bit really.

Ideally one would have a high speed camcorder or camera and take a series of video or pictures. Bill Stevens may have done this? Not sure.

Anyways Tom, I wonder if you have seen videos indicating that the line stays at the bottom over time. My guess would have been that the line actually slaps all around the ring?

The problem here is also the TYPE of one line one uses. My guess is that braided moves quite differently from thick mono which may be quite different from thin mono. My head hurts just thinking about all the possible permutations....:) And that's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of possible permutations.

Mo



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/31/2009 01:55AM by Mo Yang.

Great discussion, thanks for all your comments. I'll go to work now.

Rob, one thing about the reel being below the guides-while that's true, the centerline of the spool will be pointing right at either the centerline of the first guide or at the top of the guide (in the options we are discussing) and the line will be pulled toward that guide by forces in front of the guide either about at the centerline of the next guide or about at the top of it. Being below the ring is not, in my opinion, conclusive. Consider for example an extreme where the line would be pulled through the ring at the top of the ring straight up. Would it still be in contact with the bottom of the ring?

The fact is that I need to do some testing. I've got to convince myself through my own work. Tom is right in that regardless of how and where the line contacts the ring, the longest casting arrangement MAY be with the alignment through the top of the rings. I will try to determine with my specific blank if it IS through the top of the rings. I still have this sneaking suspicion that the first guide should be centered and the others off the top. OK I'm stubborn.

It is amazing to me that all this discussion took place in 23 hours starting on a Sunday morning. You can tell where our interests lie.

I have taken such videos and many, many hundreds of 3-shot bracketed photos of rods being cast. As soon as the line touches something, in this case the guide ring, the motion of the revolving coil is upset. If you have a large enough ring - a really large ring where line control is almost non-existent, you will get some continuation of the revolving line coil through that ring but at some point up the rod it will be upset by a subsequent guide. Even then, gravity takes over very quickly and brings the line back to the bottom of the ring.


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

I would think that you would definitely want to upset the revolving coil of line. A revolving coil of line cannot possibly be very efficient. Everything else being at least equal, baitcasters and spincasters will both outcast spinning outfits due I presume, to the fact that they pay out line in direct form instead of in large wildly revolving coils. I would think that even if you could find a way to allow the line from a spinning reel to revolve around the inside of every guide....... you would not want it to do that. Just not efficient.

OK some thing to ponder: why do those spin reels with the covers on and that little 8-10 size ring directly in front of the spool cast so well ?? Is it that the line is controlled faster.

Bill - willierods.com