I am building an 8 weight fly rod and am considering the Hopkins and Holloway guides. Primary use is for bonefish.

What experience do any of you have with the Hopkins and Holloway single foot snake guides?

Where can you buy these guides?

Is there a better single foot guide out there? Or, is it better to stick with the traditional snake guides?

Also, What size guides do you recommend for this 8 weight?

My preference is the Batson line of guides. Single foot are fine for an 8wt, I build many of them for Bonefish. If you use single foot, be sure to use the Forhan locking wrap!

Guide train 16 & 12 strippers #4 single foot the rest of the way

Bone fish means salt water, so rather than any stainless guides, I'd recommend REC titanium alloy guides. For the stripper guides, again the Fuji titanium K series work great.

Single foot guides will work, but just for robustness, I generally prefer double foot guides.

X2 REC. A little lighter and Titanium alloy. If you really want H&H should be able to get them from a vendor on the left. Phil's recommendation for snake sizes is spot on. If you go with K series ceramics use 7mm instead of 4mm. Snake guide sizes are different so a 4mm in ceramic is not the same as a 4mm snake guide.

H & H guides are a good guide, the black diamond ones are the black coating over the hard chrome finish of the non-black guides The REC guides are indeed good for saltwater, but they are very expensive and in the scheme of things the softest material these type guides are made from. Since your building your own, you can replace the guides many times over for the price of a set of REC guides and it will take a long time to need a guide replacement, if at all.
Angler's Workshop carries them, Fuji doesn't make them , but supplies them to the US so I'd expect them to be a good product. They were and may still may be the guide company used by Sage, but they use the chromed snake guides.

I agree that the REC guides are more expensive, 8@ $2.75 of them (enough for your average fly rod) costs $22 vs $11.00 for 8@ $1.39 H&H stainless guides. So you're looking at $13 more worst case, which hardly qualifies as "very expensive". In the scheme of salt water fly rods, $13 is nothing. And with the REC guides you have absolute freedom from corrosion for the life of the fly rod.

I'm sure the H&H is a good guide, but not what I would want in salt water.

Drew

Salt water ROD go REC or SS it will save in the long run never have to change them , to change guides it is a pain in the butt to me as I don't build that much now , have to dig it out before I do a guide job

William Sidney
AK

Also , take a look at SeaGuide.Corp. Titanium guides for the salt. Thomas and Thomas recommended them to me . I have built several rods using their guides. Bill

Nickel-Titanium guides are light, strong, and absolutely corrosion proof, which make them ideal for salt water use. Beware if you use the "light" REC titanium alloy guides. They are quite flexible a a blow to the guide parallel to the axis of the for can and will cause one snake-guide foot to flex enough so it "back out" from under the wraps. This can be prevented by taking a couple of Forhan wraps around each guide foot before pulling the tag ends on each side under the main wraps and applying epoxy. I have never had this problem with standard-weight REC guides.