Tom, I was going to leave this alone but I cannot let your comments about a 70 reduction in weight having a small affect on performance go without commenting. A 70% reduction may well have more than a 70% affect on performance depending upon where that weight reduction is located. It will of course also depend upon the type and weight ot the blank but If the weight were located at the tip of m
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Eugene, The affect that added weight, including guide weight, has on a rods resonant frequency and performance increases roughly exponentially as the weight is added closer and closer to the tip of the rod. An added guide near the butt of the rod will have very little affect but that same weight added near the tip can have a dramatic effect. I have made a lot of measurements of the effect t
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Billy, You may not be able to feel the difference on the type of rods that you build but if you shake most lighter weight, higher performance rods and then add a couple of guides even micro guides toward the tip of the rod and then shake it again you should be able to feel the difference. You might want to think about it like this: on many high performance rods like Steelhead drift rods or even
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Eugene, I understand and after thinking about it I think that I agree with your comments about mechanical efficiency. However, I am sorry but several of your above comments are in error. Adding guides, adding mass, will always reduce the resonant frequency not increase it and will also degrade all of those rod characteristics that resonant frequency affects. I have measured how adding guides
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Eugene, Thank you. Your explaination makes sense to me as does the term that you used "mechanical loss of efficiency". It would be easy to quantify as well by just measuring the difference between the length of the line and the rod length. However, I suspect that the reduction or the addition of a guide or two on most rods is not going to be detectable by the fisherman.
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I think that Tom is correct that todays lighter guides are much better than the guides of just a few years ago in terms of having lower mass. More guides will result in better stress distribution but more guides will result in higher mass that reduces the rods resonant frequency that results in slower response in casting, hook setting etc. and also reduces the rods sensitivity. More guides is b
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I remember reading a statement made by Gary Loomis a number of years ago that I thought expressed this point very well. He said, "I can build a rod that you cannot break but I do not think that you will want to fish with it". This may not be a direct quote but it is close.
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Anything that is done to a blank made of high modulus material to make it tougher, like making the walls thicker, can obviously also be done to a blank constructed of lower modulus material which would also make it tougher, tougher than the blank made of high modulus for the same increase in wall thickness. However, increasing wall thickness while adding directly to hoop strength does not really
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Mark, Modulus of elasticity is a property of the material not a a property of a blank. Modulus of elasticity translates into the properties of stiffness and weight in the blank. Yes, the higher the modulus of elasticity of the material in a blank the more fragile the blank is going to be if all other things are equal. It is mainly the result of something called "strain energy" whic
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Walter, The principal advantages of the micro guides are the result of the fact that they weigh less or have lower mass. Because they are smaller you can also use shorter wraps and less epoxy which will also naturally result in lower added mass. The lower mass affects the performance of a rod in several ways. First, the rod will have a higher resonant frequency with less mass hung on it or wi
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Bill, If you plan, as you say, to restrict the sale of these guides to custom rod builders that do not use the Castaway blanks and/or you plan to limit, as you say, the supply of the guides to custom rod builders so as to limit the competition to the Castaway production rods I think you should look up the Robinson/Packman Act. I am no lawyer but I think that you will probably be breaking the fe
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The terms weight and mass are often used interchangeably but weight is the affect that gravity has on an object and has nothing to do with rod loading. Going up a line size or two will increase the mass which will increse the inertia
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It is not the weight of the line that loads a fly rod it is the inertia of the line and rod. Newton's first law of motion, "A body at rest tends to stay at rest, a body in motion tends to stay in motion". In other words, inertia is the property of any mass (fly line, fly rod) that results in the mass resisting any change in position or change in velocity. If you add mass to the rod
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Phil, Carbon fiber actually maintains most of its properties at low temperatures as Tom points out. However, if you dip your rod into the water to melt ice from the guides or for whatever reason and there is a large difference between the temperature of the water and the temperature of the air the result will be a large temperature gradient over a small area of the rod and high stresses in that
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Steve, After reading Tom's post and then reading your original post over again I think that I am full of prunes and Tom is correct and many blanks will react as you describe.
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Steve, It is just a guess but I think that what you might be seeing the affect of is something that happened in the manufacturing process when that blank was built to cause the spine to rotate in the blank over a relatively short distance. For example, the prepreg wadding up in one area when wrapped on the mandrel. This could cause the blank to want to twist as a varying load was applied. In
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Ben, Go for it. If I can be of any assistance please let me know. And unblock you e-mail.
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Ben, I hate to see you spend that much money. If you go to the webs most popular @#$%& site you can buy a very good older Tektronix oscilloscope for much less than that. You can then contact me and I will tell you how to make a device that will allow you to make resonant frequency measurements. The oscilloscope will allow you to make a number of other mesurements as well. By the way, you ha
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Tom, I think that you are the one that is missing the larger point. He did not say anything about the detrimental affects of adding weight either. Bill Hanneman has advocated adding weight for several reasons. The one that you mentioned to get to the PPF and desired "feel" and he has also advocated adding weight to slow the frequency down so that it can be counted by eye. I think
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Tom, Bill and I are talking about the same thing. It does not seem to me that it makes any difference why someone would add weight. I think that it is a mistake in terms of its affect on rod performance whatever the reason. I think that it is a particularly foolish thing to do when the objective is to match the rods frequency to some ill defined and not well understood feeling or human charac
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Bill, The characteristics of a rod, despite what you think about the limits of engineering and physics, are NOT subjective, they can be very objective. Most can be measured and quantified. In time, I believe that all of the ROD characteristics will lend themselves to being measured and quantified. People are subjective but frankly I do not really think that either you or I are qualified whe
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When constructing a rod the object, in my judgment, should be to get as high a resonant frequency as possible given the rods application. The only way that the resonant frequency of a well built rod can then be altered, reduced, is by adding mass. Adding mass to reduce the resonant frequency lowers the rod's Q and will reduce virtually all of the other important properties of the rod, sensitivi
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Tom, I see what I posted more as an observation than as an insult. Are you advising me to go elsewhere?
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I do not think that the issue is really engineering terms or units of measure. The problem that I now have with the Common Sense System is first Common Sense Frequency that as a result of doing many, many measurements of rod frequency with weight added I believe to be of very limited use. Second and even more importantly I think that Bill Hanneman has gone off the deep end with his "Feel&
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Bill, I have been a little testy a couple of times and for that I apologize. You made the following statement in an earlier post and I think this is at the heart of our disagreement. "Essentially, what I am saying is that rod characterization has now independently progressed far beyond the concepts and capabilities of traditional mechanical engineers. I believe the future lies in “Fe
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Bill, We are certainly not making any headway so we should just agree to disagree. I would like to respond to your "Baloney" statement though and your last sentence. To your "Balony" statement, It might help if you did some reading. On the subject of resonant frequency I would suggest you start with the papers written by Dr. Spolek, the head of the mechanical engineering d
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Russell, You have really taken the top off of a can of worms. In fact , I am not sure where to start. First, do you have any information that is available on the Internet that would bring me up to speed on what we can and cannot feel. I really know very little about this. Your second and third paragraph, I think that in determining rod sensitivity we should focus exclusively on the rod,
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Russell, I think that you are right that is a little on the low side for resonant frequency. It is in the range of what fly rods resonate at but as a rod gets stiffer it will increase, as it get shorter it will increase and as the mass is reduced it will increase so some rods can be an order of magnitude higher than the numbers you used. I did not know the range of frequencies that your hand w
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Peter, I would agree with you that the number for resonant frequency in isolation or by itself does not tell you very much and is not very usefull. I would suggest that no single characteristic of the rod in isolation is very useful. If all you know about a rod is its weight that does not tell you enough or if all you know is the action angle that is not enough to be useful. However, you do
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