Jared,

The aforementioned formula (from the orig. CCS article) is what I’ve been using for some time. It’s an easy, quick and practical calculation to get you in the ball-park until you can perform subjective evaluation. I always do the calculation once I determine the Power and Actions of all my rods and add it to my spec sheets.

Although some rod builders or anglers may not think its worth worrying about, I believe the lure weight rating is sometimes worth considering when selecting rods/blanks for a given application. I don’t obsess about lure weight ratings, but I don’t trivialize them either.

I don’t know of anyone that’s been able to validate the veracity of the URRS Lure Rate Values, or for that matter, that’s even used them. As you’ve probably seen in the thread that Geoff mentioned regarding the issue of lure weight, there was plenty of feedback…..a mix of practical, conjectural, unrelated and philosophical. I’m not sure if any of my comments in that thread put me in the category of “flat earther” as per Geoff’s observation (Ha).

I’ll email you info on the URRS for your consideration. If you use it to determine the lure weight range, I’d be very interested in your evaluation and thoughts on it. I found it to be dramatically inconsistent with the Tom’s original calculation in the CCS article or with rod manufacturer’s ratings.

Jim, received the email and am looking forward to punching in my data as well. I will see what I can come up with and share my findings with you. Thank you for taking your time to send that.
I'm still surprised nobody had a guess or three on manufacturer of the reddish brown blank. I'm assuming they're before my time, but a really nice blank nonetheless. Maybe I should post a pic in the miscellaneous section to see if I have a taker.

Could be fenglas by Fenwick which were 'fenwick brown' (chestnut brown). They were very popular in the 70's through the 80's. I built a lot of rods on these blanks early on before graphite became popular. Just a guess. I also think lamiglas also made a brown rod along with the traditional gold colored blank. Back in the 70s and 80s Fenwick and Lamiglas were the two major blank manufacturers for rod builders. There were a handful of others but not as large or as popular, but some were very good.

Norman, I uploaded a pic to the miscellaneous photos. I haven't seen a Fenglass blank that had an unsanded (?) finish that you can see and feel the rings, but I am only comparing it to Fenglass blanks that I've had my hands on (which is very few). I was kinda wondering if it might be one of the brown Lami blanks, but I haven't seen them, only heard of them. Here is a link to the pic
[www.rodbuilding.org].

You are right the Fenwick blanks were very well finished. If my memory is serving me well, this blank does have a lamiglas look about it. The butt section of the lamiglas had a rough and unfinished look. This was where the handle would be so it did not make much of a difference. Both the fenglas and brown lamiglas blanks had a translucent finish and both were unpainted. Fenwick invented and patented the tip over butt ferrule (ferrulite). Because of this two piece lamiglas blanks at the time had a spigot ferrule. So if any of your blanks are two piece check the type of ferrule. Another brown blank that comes to mind is the Fisher blanks. They tended to be more of a brown brown. At the time all three were considered top of the line. I hope this helps
Norm

Now that I think about it the Fisher blanks had a spigot ferrule (in fact I think they invented this type of ferrule), and The Lamiglas blanks used a fiberglass sleeve to form the female ferrule. I think this is right but it had been over 30 couple years ago that I used these blanks. I think the Fisher blanks were at one time used by Winston, until they went out of business in the mid 80s. This does bring back some fond memories of my early rod making days, when the only blanks available were fiberglass, and very few companies to chose from.

You might be on to something. These three particular blanks are one piece, but there are over 100 different blanks that we have to go through, Fenglass, old honey colored Lamis, some Herter's blanks. I would love to find out if that is what they are. Good news is that these were stored well (other than they're dusty) and most seem really straight. I want to do CCS and URRS on these because they seem like really special blanks.

Norman, took another pic of the blank and posted in miscellaneous section. You can see the translucent quality of the blank and might be a better indicator of the color (natural sunlight vs indoor flourescent light)
[www.rodbuilding.org]

It does have a very nice translucence look which was characteristic of the high quality fiberglass blanks back then. The cheaper blanks of the day were painted to hide flaws in the blank. Unfortunately I can not tell what brand blank you have, but appears to be one of the higher quality blanks of the time. Some will say that they should have the manufacturers logo on the blank but this is not true in all cases many of blanks I used back then did not have the logo printed on the blank, and if they did they were easily removed. I did not like advertisements on the rods I built. Sorry I can not help further. Good luck with your detective work. Let us know how things turn out.
Norm

It would be hard to discern the actual maker from the color alone. There were so many blank manufacturers around at the time those were likely made. I don't think it's a Fenwick. Lamiglas is a possibility, so too is Fisher. But there were others making/supplying blanks in that color and unsanded finish. Heddon, Rawhide, E-Hill, Netcraft, and a host of others.

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Thank you Tom. Hopefully when I get back over to his place, hoping there might be some type of indication on some of the similar blanks (or a shipping label or anything). I did find out that some of the blanks were purchased from a retired firefighter from the department I work for. He is still alive, so I might be able to get with him and see if he did originally buy these blanks, who the manufacturer is and any other details I can glean from him. Hopefully this isn't a dead end from my standpoint. Thank you all to everyone for your help. I can't wait to build on one and more importantly, fish one.

Subjective as it may be, I couldn't begin to sell a rod to the avid bass anglers I deal with without talking about lure weight rating. I don't have a URRS chart yet and can not reconcile the CCS formula with the fly weight/16 formula. The prior gives me a range of 1/16-3/16 and the later 3/8 (6/16) as a starting point. I don't see a rod that handles 30' of 6wt fly line casting a 1/16 bait very well. Has anyone else tried both formulas for the same rod/blank?

The problem with using the line weight/16 as a casting lure weight range is that fly rod line weights aren't always based on 30 feet of the listed fly line. Some are based on much less, some on much more. Therefore "6-weight" fly rod possesses no specific amount of power. One 6-weight may be a very light powered rod while the next 6-weight might be a very powerful beast. It all depends on how much line length the manufacturer intended to be cast and fished. Of course, this has nothing to do with the CCS - it's just an old idea that at one time probably had some merit when rod line weights were actually based on 30 feet of the listed fly line.

But it might still give you some place to start. A rod listed as a "6-weight," if we were to assume that was based on the power and action to work with 30 feet of 6-weight line, should cast 3/8th of an ounce reasonably well. You would then have a bit of a range to work within, say maybe an eighth down and an eighth up, so your 6-weight rod might be okay with a casting lure weight range of from 1/4 to 1/2 ounce.

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You soon get in uncharted waters comparing fly rod blanks to spin rod blanks. It's like comparing cracking a bullwhip to the hammer toss.
That said, one ounce = 437.5 grains. The long extinct FTMA declared a six weight fly rod was best suited to throw a line [not a lure!] weighing 160 grains. One sixteenth of an ounce equals 27.34 grains, so a 6 weight blank would need a lure weighing six times more than 1/16 oz. to cast efficiently. Might better stick to spin casting blanks.

Which would be 3/8th ounce as I mentioned above. Since a fly rod blank doesn't know it's not a spinning blank, or vice versa, the old rule of thumb was to use 16 as the denominator and the fly line weight number as the numerator for a casting weight equivalent. Therefore a 6-weight fly rod would effectively cast 6/16ths of an ounce, or 3/8ths. Supposedly. Maybe.

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