Michael, you can have the infinitely flexible tip, so long as the blank is massless and possesses infinite power, you fish with 'light' (massless) line targeting spherical fish, and use a Carnot engine to arrive at your fishing spot.

Now, I'll apologize for the bad freshman physics world joke.

I was just taking things to extremes to prove the point. All you need to get 90 is a short very soft tip on a strong butt section.

Michael, I got your point, but I just had to give you a bit of a ribbing. You can get there with just about any blank before it fails. I remember some pics in the gallery from a few years back of Billy Vivona testing some blanks, possibly the Rod Geeks X-Comp blanks, using a 5 gallon bucket and a porch rail. Those blanks took loads and deflected to extremes I wouldn't have naively thought possible.

Mark, I forgot to mention earlier, great work on the AA jig. That is pretty impressive.

No problem, Joe. But now "You can get there with just about any blank before it fails" and yesterday it was theoretically impossible?

I should be a preacher.

But seriously, you don't have to go to the Vivona extreme, (Billy's examples don't really apply since he most likely was taking the flex far beyond 1/3 of the length) and I was sticking to this issue because I truly believe there is no validity to the allegation that with a beam of varying section, like a rod blank, you cannot get the tip to an angle of 90 degrees at a flex of 1/3 its length. I still hold to that position until someone proves it invalid. I maintain that all you need to get 90 is a very soft tip on a strong butt section.

While many may argue "what the heck difference does it make," I argue that we are talking about the very complex interaction of power and speed of a rod blank, and the better we understand it, the better we will be able to choose blanks for specific techniques and preferences. I guarantee that from my participation in a number of fishing forums, there is one heck of a lot of confusion and inaccuracies that are being pedaled as fact.

Touche Michael. I would still say that it is within the limits of the measuring device.

You certainly don't have to go to the Vivona extreme to get close enough to 90 degrees. I also agree that it would be technically possible to have a blank with a flexible enough tip and enough power in the butt to get there within the 1/3 of the blank deflection. I'm sure if you took some of those very fast action blanks and extended them a bit, you could certainly get there. Whether or not there is a blank currently available to get there, I have no idea. My instinct is that Tom has likely handled enough of what is available at least here in the US to have a pretty representative sample of what is out there, but there still may be outliers.

I think Mark's search for a range of known numbers was as much about the design limits of his jig as it was about the practicality of the matter.

In terms of your last statement, that is a sentiment that can be applied to many different topics.

I built a 8 1/2 foot hot shot rod blank into a fly rod. It will cast an 11 weight fly line 80' with ease, but the timing is a bit tricky.

This post was intended to simply discover the minimum and maximum AAs to be encountered to enable me to build my fixture to cover that range; if it could only measure some but not all blanks, it would be worthless. With many of your gracious contributions, I have been able to achieve just that and it works perfectly, precisely and is repeatable = thanks to all. The ability to incorporate the same digital level to initially set the centerline of blank to precisely level and also measure the achieved AA as well eliminates any margin of error between the two procedures. Additionally, the base of the fixture does not require a level, or even flat, surface. I consider precision extremely practical. With that said, there are no “design limits” and in fact would contest the accuracy of my fixture against any other.

Mark Talmo
FISHING IS NOT AN ESCAPE FROM LIFE BUT RATHER A DEEPER IMMERSION INTO IT!!! BUILDING YOUR OWN SIMPLY ENHANCES THE EXPERIENCE.