I am a learner when it comes to fly fishing and building fly rods. And Math is not my strong suit but nonetheless I can get by. I have 2 fly rods I'm working on and decided to try out the common cents approach.
#1 is a Hook and Hackle marketed as a 10wt and if I did it right I had 88 "shiny cents" ERN 10.7 and AA of 70 seems about right
#2 is a Rainshadow Eternity marketed as an 8 wt and same if I did it right 93 cents or 11.51 ERN AA 75/80 ish
Now that seems off. What am I looking at now. Lol
Help
Thanks, Mark

There is no specs on what an 8 wt. should be, sounds like the Rainshadow is both more powerful and faster than my Sage TCR 8 wt.was.

Both blanks are correctly labeled. There is no industry standard for what constitutes a "10-weight." Any rod will cast any line, at some distance.

The Common Cents measurement, assuming you took those measurements correctly, shows that the Rainshadow blank has a faster action and is more powerful than the Hook and Hackle blank. But both are 10-weight rods. Expect the H&H to cast easily at short to medium distances with the Rainshadow having a bit more "oomph" for longer casts with the same 10-weight line.

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

Funny, I have a Rainshadow Rx8 8wt that feels like at least a 10 weight. My guess is, they spec thm that way on purpose. With that said, it's been an excellent durable rod and is almost always my Alaska back up.

The whole point of the common sense thing is to standardize all of this, but with all the manufactures changing specs so fast, it makes using a library of measurements less useful than it could be.

Anyway, you got what you got. Go out and cast, and to make the Rainshadow work, you may need to up line it a bit.

Drew

Well, I plan to use the rainshadow for steelhead and "chuck and duck" so it should fill the bill then. Thanks

I think there was an error in the Eternity evaluation. I have quite a bit of experience measuring fly blanks, including that one, 2 other 8's, and an Eternity 9. Plus some lighter power fly rods. All of them are to the high end of the specs for their advertised weight or low into the next heavier wt class. None is two wt classes higher than its description. I correlate well with the Fuji Point Blank published measurements for spin/cast blanks, and I have correlation with a few manufactures' measurements for their blanks (not fly). The 3 8's and the 9 I've measured seemed to perform consistently with the CCS
numbers.
My 8 Eternity= 79 pennies, 70 degrees. 9.7 (This rod is definitely more powerful and faster than the Quickline- I have used them both quite a bit)
Eternity 9 = 87 pennies, 70 degrees 10.1 (This rod is definitely more powerful than the 8 Eternity)
Rainshadow RX8 8 wt = 76 pennies, 66 degrees (one can watch fish fighting with this rod to see it is slower than the Eternity 8. 9.1
Quicklne 8 wt = 76, 69 degrees. 9.1

I've measured the line actual wts for a couple of these rods and indeed the lines that cast the best (for me, not a long range flycaster) for them are + 1 .

I suggest you measure the Eternity again. It looks to me like an error in the deflection calculation (although I admit, 1/3 of 9 seems pretty easy). I believe an Eternity 10 or 11 would have their typical 70 (approx) AA



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/26/2019 02:59PM by Michael Danek.

Michael, I took your suggestion and did it again. 92 pennies the second time. Eternity 2 blank. I just dont know.

As i recall, you can get a one or two penny difference on the same rod if the spine position is different..

This looks far from a one or two penny situation lol.

Agree with Herb. Could be a mis-labled blank. If you want an 8, ask Rainshadow-there is little chance they don't have CCS numbers on all their blanks.

Can you weigh it? Eternity 10 wt weighs .4 more than their 8.

I have built on the same blank last year. My measurements for ETER909-4CB were:
Weight: 2.23oz spec: 2.20, ERN: 11.46 (102c) 330gr, AA: 68, CCF: 80.5

Regarding the original post, 93 cents gives 10.8 ERN, doesn't it? Still quite a ways off from what one would expect. Roman, 330 grams = 132 pennies ? Which is ERN over 13? Do I need a refresher on how to read the chart? Thanks in advance for any help here.

Michael Danek Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Regarding the original post, 93 cents gives 10.8
> ERN, doesn't it? Still quite a ways off from what
> one would expect. Roman, 330 grams = 132 pennies ?
> Which is ERN over 13? Do I need a refresher on
> how to read the chart? Thanks in advance for any
> help here.

Michael, sorry for the confusion... I shouldn't have included "330 grain" number in my post. It's actually the calculated line weight for the ERN.

I wasn't aware that there was a calculated line weight for ERN.

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

:)

Yes, there was some simple formula I have found on this website a few years ago. Unfortunately, I can no longer find it using the search feature. So, if Tom says there is no way to calculate the "optimal" 30' fly line weight from the ERN, then this number is irrelevant. Please disregard.

You may be thinking of Dr. Hanneman's suggestion that as a starting point, that you can use the formula ELN=ERN, at 30 feet of line past the tip. But he was careful not to state that a rod's ERN does dictate that a particular line weight should be used. He recognized that different fishermen have different casting strokes and fish at different distances, so ELN=ERN is only a place to start if you are attempting to initially match a line to a rod. Depending on your needs and fishing situation, you might find that ELN=ERN-2, or ELN=ERN+1, etc.

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

Mark, did you get the opinion of Rainshadow?

Regardless of the lack of an industry standard, something is very wrong when, if it's true, blanks labeled as an 8 wt test to be 11.5 wt. If the test was correctly done, this blank is not correctly labeled as an 8.

Even at 11.51 ERN the blank could be correct when labeled as an 8-weight. Each manufacturer has to decide just how much power his "8-weight" rod should have. I would agree that's getting up there and believe it would be hard to load at any distance with an 8-weight line, but that part is up to the manufacturer.

It is also possible that the blank was mis-labeled or mis-bagged.

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

The difficulty of casting with the line one would expect for an 8 is one of the reasons why I believe something is very wrong here. If the test is correct this blank is well out of the range for customer expectations. If a manufacturer normally labeled blanks this powerful as 8's, I think their sales would quickly die.

Blank manufacture is a pretty precise operation and this big of a deviation from what I have experienced with Eternity fly blanks leads me to believe it is not what Rainshadow normally provides as an 8.

I still am curious about what this blank is. Weighing the blank and measuring the butt diameter would probably tell. And there is the possibility that the CCS was not done correctly twice. I've made the same mistake twice before. It would only take a moderate deflection error for the Eternity 8 to give this kind of ERN and AA.

I don't have CCS data on all the Eternities, but I did find numbers I took on the 8wt. They're listed below. I hope this helps.

ETEF908-4: IP: 195g ERN: 9.66 AA: 68

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