if i follow the 27x to a t i get 10 guides plus the tip top. 1 3/8 spool dia reel on a 7' ML rod with a short but grip, 16-8-3.5 to tip fishing for redfish on 8# braid 5/16 oz jig. i want to try this method without letting my preconcieved notions get in the way. what i read said i should be at 8 guides but i laid it out to ten and wasn't sure which direction i should be going. i am going to set it up and try it but wanted some advice first. tried a search but didn't see much. thank you for all the great info i get off this forum!

I don't think that number is terribly out of line. But you can likely do it with a guide or two less. Maybe.

I sense the problem you're having is that with a very small spool reel and light line your choker guide falls a pretty good distance back from the tip of a rod that lone. That's as it should be with that reel and line. The additional guides you're having to use are distributing stress on the upper half of the rod. Because you're using very light and supple line you can easily use very small guides from the choker guide on out. This means that even with 10 guides you shouldn't be paying much of a weight penalty.

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When I build 7'0" inshore spinning rods with micro-guides, I usually have 10 guides. I am not using a "small" reel, per se. The typical reel is a Shimano 3000 or Daiwa 2500 (approximately equivalent in size/capacity). IMO, your use of a similar number of guides sounds about right.

Take the combo out for a test cast and see what happens. In particular, make some really long high arcing casts and watch the line play out immediately after the cast. Study the path from the reel to the butt guide and then the subsequent movement upward. It will take a few casts before you become proficient at looking at the right place in a short enough time to effectively watch the action.

thank you for the input. my "preconcieved notion" was too many guides but i'm learning. when i flexed the rod to the drag setting i typically use the static distribution did look a bit off. Jim, i was using that same size real till recently, i made the switch to braid and was inspired by your comment about lighter set ups in a previous post and put on an old 4200ss i had laying around and caught a 26" redfish on it. i seem to really enjoy catching fish on the smallest lightest setup possible. when i work the kinks out of this setup i'm gonna build a 5s69mlxf and put a 1000ci4 on it. should be fun.

Leigh, I've learned that you have to take the "correct number" of guides notion with a grain of salt. It's a good place to start, but you need to let the blank that's actually in your hands determine the will work for you.

Let me give you an illustration. I build mostly surf rods, but this is a generic term, and there are very light and very heavy surf rods. Say I'm building a 9-foot heavy spinning plugging rod, for 3-5 oz. wood plugs (I affectionately call these rigs my Big Wood Heavers). Say at the same time I'm building a surf rod on 9-foot fiberglass steelhead blank that will be used to throw 1/4 and 1/2 oz. bucktails to fluke in the suds. These rods are both 9 feet, but having built many rods like both of these, I can tell you from experience that there will be at least three or four fewer guides on the Big Wood Heaver than there will be on the Fluke Assassin. This is for a couple of reasons: the handle on the heavier rod is likely to be longer, leaving less length between the reel and the tip, and also the lighter rod bends more, which requires more guides for good stress distribution.

But if you look at these two rods, they're both nine-foot surf rods, and they "should" have around 9 guides. But one will have 7 or 8, and the other will have 10 or 11. This doesn't mean that either is built wrong, it just means that the two blanks are configured differently, and the guides are positioned to reflect that.

So don't let deviation from the norm get you down. If your setup works for you, then go with it, and forget what the book says you should have.

Leigh -

If you want to have an incredible amount of fun with light tackle for inshore use ... build yourself a 3S76MLXF and pair it with one of the new Stradic CI4 reels and 8# braid. BTW, that particular blank is available in a two-piece version for just a few bucks more.

Jim -

Chris
i'm having a hard time unlearning what i thought i knew and a great time learning what i didn't know.

Jim
my second to last rod build was a 5s76mlf that me and my son fight over every time we fish together. i don't have one of the new ci4's yet but we fish the 2500 on it. it's like x-ray vision,the amount of sensitivity that thing has is unreal, it is taking some getting use to.