I tried to rate a couple Loomis cb 845 (factory rated MH for lures 3/8-1 oz) and a St. Croix 7 med. spinning rod (1/8 to 5/8 oz lures) with the common cents system. Using formulas that Tom provided in previous posts, I found the it took 100 pennies (which corresponds to a rod capable of casting 3/4 oz.) to load the rod sufficiently to deflect it 1/4 of its length. I did not have enough pennies to load the rods to 1/3 of their length. Also, unless I am mistaken, I believe that Tom had mentioned that 1/4 length deflection would equal the minimum lure weight for these type of rods.

I do not find a 3/4 oz minimum lure rating to accurately reflect these rods. For the loomis, 3/4 oz I would expect to be closer to the max and for the st. croix, I do not cast lure over 1/2 oz on it. I must be missing something in the conversion of lure weight from cent values. Or have others had problems with conventional rods as well?

Dean

I am trying to measure my bass rods also, and have posted here already on that subject. As Tom K says, the 1/3 deflection weight is NOT the same as the appropriate lure weight, it is just the weight that is the standard (and partly arbitrary) part of the CC analysis. I'm waiting (weighting?) for the next issue of RM which I'm told will deal with our more powerful rods. Meanwhile, I'd suggest to you that you invest in a cheap but accurate postal scale, weigh some 8 and 6 oz lead sinkers and match them to the equivalent number of 1996-and-later pennies (one penny = 2.5 grams), then you can build up the weight quickly, fine tune at the end with individual pennies.

If you're pushing blanks that are factory rated for nearly 1 ounce then you've gone past the place where the formulas work. I believe Tom said that these heavier rods would be covered in one of the future installments of the common cents series. As far as which issue I have no idea.

Just glue some 1996 and later pennies together. I have glued up some in stacks of 10. Just a drop of super glue is all it takes and doesn't add enough weight to throw anything off.

Also the weight you add to make the rod deflect the proper distance is not the correct casting weight. Just in case anybody misread the article.

Oops I see you already covered the part about the deflection weight and the casting weight.

I guess I don't see the reason for trying to rate the casting weights for spinning and casting rods. These are for the most part rated fairly accurately by the manufacturers and pretty consistently at that. At least it seems so to me. Sure, rate the action angle, and that will be correct for any rod type at the full deflection distance listed in the article, but beyond that, why do it?

The whole purpose behind the common cents line weight rating system seems to me to be because none of the fly rod manufacturers can agree on how much weight any particular line weight rod should be capable of handling. You really don't have that problem with spinning and casting rods. They're all pretty close.

So rate them all for action angle but reserve the line weight rating for fly rods only. That's what the system was designed and intended for. If you have to guess at the correct casting weight, hang some weights on the end of the rod and shake it. You'll come pretty close if not dead on. But this is something you can't do with a fly rod other than buying a bunch of lines and going out and casting them. The common cents system was created with this problem in mind.

Mike,

As I build mostly casting and spinning rods I find that there is great disparity about how the individual mfrs. rate their blanks. What one calls a 1/4-3/4oz. Lure weight is not always the same as another. Actions also vary widely from what one calls fast compared to another. Through my experience I have gotten some feel as to which blanks match each other from different mfrs. but it would be a tremendous help if they were all rated with the same system. An example would be if I have a longtime Loomis user that I am trying to switch over to Allstar, I have to be able to match his favorite Loomis with an Allstar. I can tell you from experience that Loomis and Allstars' terminology and ratings are not the same. As to which one is correct, I haven't a clue......yet. By rating them with the common cents system it will help me give a customer exactly what he is looking for.

Ray

I want to know the power rating for my casting and spinning rods so as to have a measure of their hook-setting and fish-fighting ability, I'm more interested in that than in knowing the appropriate lure weight for casting. I fish mainly for freshwater bass, under conditions where casting distance is rarely an important issue. Depending on the lure I'm fishing, and how I'm fishing it, I may want a more or a less powerful rod. The current typical designations for such rods (medium-light, medium, medium-heavy, etc.) tell me too little, and are not uniform from one manufacturer to another. The Common Cents methods seems to be a good, simple, quantitative approach. The relative numerical power values are what I want, in addition to the numerical action values.

The Common Cents System won't really give you a rating for the fish fighting power or hook setting ability. Sorry. It wasn't designed for that, but you can arrive at this by using the manufacturer's power ratings or a careful analysis of the blank butt and tip diameters, overall weight, and then considering these variables within the confines of the material the blank is constructed from.

The Action Angle part of the Common Cents System is accurate and will work on any rod, regardless of power or type, with the blank deflected a distance equal to 1/3rd of its overall length.

For rating casting and spinning rods for the correct casting weight, a slightly different formula is used. These rods typically come into the power part of their design much more quickly than lighter rods, or fly rods, and thus only a portion of their overall length is used for casting. Dr. Bill will expand on this in a future article.

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Tom, you said, "The Common Cents System won't really give you a rating for the fish fighting power or hook setting ability". But I would argue that the CC method - the actual measurement method and the resulting "number of cents" it yields - gives a simple, reliable, reproducible method of measuring the force required to obtain a certain standard rod deflection. That numerical result, the raw data, does correlate with the concept "power", a rod requiring 120 cents will be more powerful than one requiring, say, 100 cents. These numbers can then be further correlated with any fishing parameter that is power-dependent, whether it be line or lure weight for casting (as Dr. Bill is doing), or, as another example, hook-setting power. The correlation will be different, but it will be real, and likely useful, even if not as fully refined as Dr. Bill is doing for line/lure weights.

As it stands, the deflection amount relates to the proper casting weight, line or lure, not the overall deadlifting power of the blank. And that's where lifting or pulling power comes in.

Hook setting has more to do with than just rod power. Length is a critical factor as well, with more powerful, yet shorter blanks, sometimes not having the hook setting power of longer, less powerful blanks. Hook setting is sometimes a matter of how far and/or how fast you move the line/hook.

Beyond that, there's no reason you can't develop your own standard for rating the lifting power of a blank. To do it, however, I think you'd want your deflection weight to be the same all the time, and the varying deflection distances for each blank would then yield your relative power ratings. That's how I'd do it anyway, and that's how many of the manufacturer's do it now. You certainly don't need any additional information or equations to set up such a thing. You could move ahead with it as is.

For that matter, and for what it appears you're looking for, you could use the actual number of cents required to deflect the rod the specified distance as your power rating. It seems reasonable that a rod that needs 100 cents to deflect the 1/3rd distance would be less powerful than one that requires 150 cents to do the same. So you rate the power of the first at 100 and the power of the later at 150. Or assign a power rating to multiples of ten, or twenty, or whatever. Not a bad idea. Power ratings such as Medium, Heavy, or 1, 2, 3, 4 are all meant to be relative ratings anyway, so with the Common Cents rating you would just be assigning greater resolution to the same ratings, depending on how you want to group multiples of cents, if at all.

I think there's a lot of room for additions to the Common Cents System and once adapted, it could become a system that would tell you about anything you wished to know about a blank. I sort of figured all along that builders would expand beyond the action and line or lure matching concepts and add additional parts to it. No reason it can't be done.

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What the heck, let's add a new facet to the Common Cents System, ERP or Effective Rod Power. This would just be the number of cents required to deflect the rod to a distance equal to 1/3rd of its total length.

So now with one simple deflection, and the counting of some cents, we'd have the rod's -

Effective Rod Number (found by the chart in the article)
Effective Line Number (converted from the ERN)
Action Angle
Defined Bending Index (ERN/AA)
Effective Rod Power (The number of cents used to achieve the required deflection distance)

Not bad for one simple set-up and deflection.

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ERP! Right, exactly what I've been doing since I read the CC article. I use the # of pennies as my raw data, assume it correlates with overall rod power. I've already got some interesting results. There's one store brand of rod (not a high-end one) where M and MH rods (as labeled by them) give almost the identical number of cents for 1/3 deflection. Exactly what my on-water experience indicated, they behave virtually the same. Thanks Tom.

[www.rodbuilding.org]

See the above thread- I had the exact same problem (an ultralight rod was rated as capable of slinging extreme weights). As Tom explained it, and you remembered correctly, Table C on page 16 "For Casting and Spinning Rods" is not really meant to show the recommended lure weight, it is meant to show the absolute maximum lure weight. It is confusing, as it doesn't say this, and this is not how the system works for fly rods. Tom had suggested in my thread to deflect to 1/4 of the rod length, instead of 1/3, to get a better handle on recommended low end for lure weights.

I think the table is way off for spinning rods. The ERN rating, based on pennies, needs to be divided by a factor of 2 or maybe even 3 before you look at table C (which kind of stinks, because it sort of defeats the whole purpose of the system (you know, the"99% of the confusion that exists between fishermen and their rods would be solved once and for all" part). In other words, a rod with an ERN of 8.5 at 1/3 deflection is probably best suited for lure weights of less than 1/4 oz, not the 1/2 oz suggested.

The system works great as a way to compare rods, but each person is going to need to come up with their own standard for rating lure weights based on a rods ERN.

The system is perfect as is. The article is written for fly rods, not spinning rods. If there is an update for spinning rods then I assume it will be in a future issue. I think some of you guys are trying to put a square peg in a round hole. Let's give the Dr. some time to cover everything before throwing everything out. We already know how well it works for fly rods. I'd guess that he also has the stuff figured out for spinning rods and will present that in due course.

If you already the casting weights that are best for your spinning rods then why are you trying to find those weights with any sort of system? I read the article and it seemed to be about fly rods. The only conversion listed was for fly line weight to spinning or casting lure weights and that table has been around for 40 years and is known to be accurate.

For instance, an 8-weight fly rod is throwing a half ounce of weight when you've got 30 feet of 8 weight fly line on there. So it will also work with a half ounce lure. Or a spinning rod that will throw a half ounce lure will also throw an 8 weight fly line.

Larry- the reason to try the system is to be able to rate a blank before you use it. What some of us are finding is that the system is over-rating lightweight spin blanks (i.e. the manufacurers rating and the ERN rating is very far off- much farther off than rating a 4 wt. blank as a 5 wt).

I'm guessing that what is happening is that the system is directly equating casting a certain size weight with a spinning blank to casting that same weight with a fly blank. Perhaps we are discovering that the industry standard for spinning rods is set up to have them be far more stiff than fly rods...

I can't wait for the article on spinning rods so this can be cleared up.

This is primarily a problem with the extra fast taper rods, which many of the non-fly blanks are. The good Dr. has prepared a whole series of articles that cover just about everything, and then some. But it's going to take me a full year to get through all of them. It's very involved, but not really hard to use once you get underway.

It may be another issue or two before a specific article on spinning and casting rods is published. Dr. Bill wants to finish up all the info on fly rods and lines first. In the interim, I will publish the equation for the heavier spin and cast rods, but I want to make sure they're on the money first, and that Dr. Bill is finished with them. I feel fairly competent in using and explaining the system, but it's not my creation nor my place to interject too much too soon.


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An interesting sidenote - In the past month I've had no less than 3 people call me and attempt to take some measure of credit for the Common Cents System. None have said that it wasn't the brainchild of Dr. Hanneman, but rather than he approached them with the system and they either "encouraged" him to continue his research regarding it, or had him contact me.

In every case, I suspect they were either baffled by the system or just wanted to get rid of this "kook." Now that the industry is taking notice of Common Cents, some of the guys who waved it off earlier would like to get in on the credit!

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Tom,

But it isn't the heavy rods where this is an issue, it's with the lighter weight rods. It seems that not many people use the system with spinning rods, as no one ever chimes in and says "the system worked perfectly for my ultra-light spinnng rod." I believe there have been 4 original posts about this exact issue now- that very light (less than 1/4 oz recommended lure weight) spinning blanks required something like 100 pennies (or more) to deflect to 1/3 of their length. Perhaps you are right that it is because many of them are fast, but any way you slice it, it should be revisited to avoid confusion. At the very least, it would be great to see a new Table C with reasonable lure weight recommendations based upon a rods ERN.

As to people taking credit- that is an unfortunate side of human nature. You can just smile and point to your publication date as they come out with their own versions! Kudos to you for bringing this to the surface.

I've used it on some of my lighter weight spinning rods and found it to be accurate, at least as far as the lure weights that I've found to work best all around. This didn't exactly jive with the manufacturer's rating, but the manufacturer's rating didn't exactly jive with the lure weight I found to work best.

I have Dr. Bill's future installments of the Common Cents articles and as I have time I've been playing with them a bit more. I need to put some of the heavier rods through their paces. Something which I just haven't had enough time to do thus far. I suspect that once the entire system has been presented, everything will be fine.

I do wish I could just fill one entire issue with the system and have it all in one place, all at one time, but that wouldn't be fair to the many thousands of readers who for whatever reason, couldn't really care less about the Common Cents System. Such is the dilema of a magazine publisher.

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