Renovating and old 7' casting rod with up-to-date Fugi grips, reel seat, and guides. The rod before stripping weighed in at 9.34 oz. The stripped rod blank now weighs 2.33 oz.

The planned KR Concept reduction train is:
LKW10-LKW6-KB4-KB4-KB4-KT4-KT4-KT4-KT4-KT4-LG tip top. All guides are CG silver Alconite.

Looking for a suggested line guide to stripper guide distance. Looking at a PB76MHXF (before it was "re-labeled" as a MHF rod) I built years ago, that distance was 22" - but that was for a 7'6" rod.

Assistance appreciated. Never used the LKW guides before.but I guess they are close in height to the KWs...

Ron B.

Ron Beloff

Your guide line-up looks good to me, although I didn't count them. Your stress test and whether you build it on top or spiral will determine the number. You could take the KB's out a couple more. And the KB and KT 4's are really small guides. Make sure you are confident with tying a knot that will go through them well with pound test leader knots (if any) that you plan to use. If I were doing it, I would probably go to 5's so I would be sure a knot made of 20 braid and 20 FC would go through well. I am always in favor of designing rods that are versatile, that will work even if you change your mind about reel size, pound test line, leader vs no leader knot, etc.

Thanks for your input.

Rod has two duties:
(1) Flipping and pitching and
(2) Casting HB frogs.

This is my dedicated SLOP rod. 65 lb braid is all I ever use. The Berkley X9 65 braid is like 50 lb diameter. No knots -.straight from to lure.

LKW-10, 15.1mm KW-10, 14.6mm in height. 20 - 22" ahead of the reel guide should also be fine. Should come in right around 5 oz.s. Don't hold me to that, lol

I've used the Mudhole elite chart (the one laid out for using more guides than the standard chart) on moderate, moderate fast, and fast action casting blanks. At first, I started checking the chart's spacing against storyboards from attempts at static loading. The proportional, progressive, and close spacing of the chart closely matched what appeared to be optimum across this wide range of actions on several 84-86 inch rods. I've experienced very good casting distances on rods built to this chart, especially on ones with the KR system. Certainly, more experienced builders than me could usually tweak and improve over this table on individual blanks. My semi-scientific takeaway, though, is that less experienced builders would have a hard time going very wrong with this chart. This would seem to check out mathematically. The distance between a stripping guide and the tip on an 84" casting rod is going to be pretty close to 50" (unless a pretty non-standard grip length is used). If you are spanning this with nine guides, and proportionally decreasing the spacing going towards the tip, there just isn't a great deal of possible variance. In this table, the stripping guide is 49 3/4" from the tip and the second guide is 41 1/8" for a 8 5/8" difference. This also puts about a 20-22 inch increment to the reel guide.



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 04/21/2020 07:20PM by Kendall Cikanek.

Thanks for inputs. Hoping it will be a light rod when done (it has to be lighter than it's original build weight of 9.34 oz!). My PB 761MHXF came in around 4.7oz.

Your'e doing good.