I'm in the process of building a plugging rod for the surf, and while I haven't determined final guide placement yet, I'm contemplating what kind of guides I'm going to end up putting on the finished rod. In the past, I've used Aluminum Oxide (Fuji BSVOG) guides on my rods, and I've been very pleased with the results. For this rod, though, I was intending to go the whole nine yards, and so I w
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Todd, when I was building my first rod, I went through the same thing you're going through -- I didn't want to spend a ton of money on a bunch of different guides, knowing that I was going to be using only a small percentage of them. My solution -- and one I recommend to any rodbuilder -- is to buy a bunch of the cheapest guides that you can find. I settled on Fuji concept aluminum oxide ring
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My suggestion, Chuck -- and I'll admit that I don't have a whole lot of experience with this -- is to use the smaller (25) guide during test casting, and then once you decide where you want the butt guide to be, pull off the 25 and replace it with the 30. If you notice an increase in casting distance, go with the 30; if you don't, go back to the 25. In my limited experience, I've found that we cu
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The generosity of people on this board, and the willingness of rodbuilders to help others, never cease to amaze me. While I understand there is some degree of self-interest involved -- thinking through issues like these makes us all better rodbuilders -- I'm still nearly always surprised how willing people are to give assistance to others. It's such a pleasant contrast to what the rest of the wor
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I agree with Mike. Compare a fly rod -- even a heavyweight like a 12-wt -- to, say, an inshore conventional rod. The conventional rod is like a pool cue in comparison. Regardless of where you put the spine, you're not going to lift a tarpon with a fly rod. And since you're not going to lift it, you might as well put the guides in the position where they're least likely to cause rod twist -- which
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I have to admit that while I understand, appreciate, and believe in the New Concept system, when I built my first few spinning rods, I cheated, and cut corners when determining the size and placement of guides. Coming to grips with the procedure just seemed too much, considering that I was learning the rudiments of rodbuilding on the fly as well. I did static distribution tests, and a few practic
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Thanks for the opinions, guys. I have a perfect solution: A couple of weeks ago, I ordered a new 10-wt blank, and am going to be building it over the next month or two. For the new rod, I will use only ceramic guides (though I think I'll be using something cheaper than titanium/SIC), and when I'm finished I'll compare the performance of the snake-guide rod to the ceramic rod. My guess is that I'm
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Thanks for the responses, guys. I think that I am going to put a new tip-top on -- I don't like the one that's on there now -- and then go out and have fun until I have enough experience to decide what I want to do. I look back on my early non-fly-fishing experiences, when I thought I knew what I was doing (and what I wanted), and I shudder, realizing how misguided I was. Experience indeed trumps
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No, the guides and the tip-top are in perfect alignment -- I made sure of that before I finished them. What might be the problem is the angle of the loop on the tip top. If you lay the rod flat on a table, with the guides and top pointing up, on most rods the tip-top's loop would NOT be pointing straight up (perpendicular), but would be pretty close to that position -- maybe only 10 or 15 deg
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Thanks the responses. I did do a static test, and did do some test casting, before I wrapped the guides and finished them. They might not be located where someone who's built 1,000 fly rods might put them, but I am convinced that the guides are in acceptable locations. I've gone through the same procedures with both spinning and casting blanks, with very good results, and I don't see why a fly ro
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A few months ago, I built my first fly rod, a 9', 10/11 wt for use primarily in targeting striped bass in surf and estuary (saltwater) situations. Being a relative newbie to rodbuilding, and a complete newbie to both fly fishing and fly rod building, I tried to get decent equipment that was relatively inexpensive; if I was going to screw up my first fly rod, I didn't want to do it with a $400 Sag
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I agree with Tom: before I got into building fly rods, I did some reasonably extensive research, and I found that the number of pieces had no influence on breakage. Quality does make a difference, and quality varies from blank to blank and manufacturer to manufacturer, but I found that Company Q's XX model will have the same break resistance whether the blank is 2, 3, or 4 piece. I build only
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I checked out the new site, and it looks great. I will continue to be a happy and enthusiastic (if small) Mudhole customer.
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Thanks, Rick -- that blank looks great. I'm still going to go home and pour a cold one and go through the catalog, but that's a big help.
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Thanks for the responses. Whatever blank I end up deciding on, I will definitely get it from one of the sponsors here. As far as length, I'm relatively open-minded. I suppose that ideally the rod would be in the 6 1/2 - 7 1/2 foot range, but I would be willing to use another length blank if it offered more versatility in terms of sinker sizes it could handle. I would, though, prefer to avoid
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I've built rods before -- fly and heavy surf spinning -- but I've never tackled a casting reel, and after 10 minutes with a blank catalog my head is swimming. I searched the message boards to see if this topic had come up before, and while I saw some similar threads, I didn't see one that answered all my questions. I'd like to build a conventional rod that will be used as an all-purpose north
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Charlie, I am a novice rodbuilder, but I have built two surf rods from Mudhole special surf blanks. Go to their website, and click on specials, then on "Rod Blank Specials" and then on "Surf Rocket Special Blanks." The first one I built was the extra-heavy, 6-16 oz. heaver. Even though the conditions don't warrant using it much (and I knew that when I built it), I LOVE it,
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Thanks for the reposnses. Tom -- I used five minute epoxy. I thought that it might have been that, too, but it's the same stuff I've used on other rods without a problem (it's even from the same batch). And the fact that it broke below where the epoxy was applied -- it's about an inch and a half from the top, and an inch from the bottom of the tip-top thread wrap - made me think the epoxy wasn't
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Well, it was fun while it lasted... I'd built a few rods before, but my big project this winter was to build my first fly rod. Since most of my fishing is in the Jersey surf, I wanted a relatively stout outfit to go after striped bass. Because one of my pet peeves is how expesive heavier-duty saltwater fly outfits are, I wanted to use the rudimentary rod-building skills I had picked up to try
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I will second Tom K's advice, and will shamelessly plug his book, even though I have no financial interest in it. If his book can get me to figure out how to do a wrap -- I'm all thumbs -- then it is pretty much idiot-proof.
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I'm in the process of building a 9', 10-11 wt fly rod, that I'll be using to fish for striped bass and bluefish, almost exclusively from shore (surf and back bay). I've built other rods before, but this is my first fly rod, and I have a question about wrapping the guides. On all the other surf rods I built, I used an underwrap of Size A thread, and wrapped the guides onto the blank with Size D
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I don't want to sound heretical, but about 98% of my fishing is surf, and a good bit of that is with plugs. After trying all the different materials -- cork, EVA, hypalon, etc. - I would never build any surf rod with anything other than cork tape. This is my personal preference, and others may disagree with me, but I've found that the sythetics are too soft, and cork is too flimsy, at least f
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As a novice rodbuilder, I've learned that one of the best pieces of advice I've ever gotten was from Tom Kirkman's rodbuilding book, and that is to ignore spacing charts, and to determine guide placement (and what size they should be) through experimentation and trial and error. If we strive to be craftsmen as rod builders, and to construct better products than the factories, we need to be recogn
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One more piece of advice, that I think would have helped me when I started: Get a bunch of guides, in a bunch of different sizes, that are the cheapest you can find. One of my big fears when I built my first rod was ordering the wrong stuff, or the wrong quantity. I wish I had invested $20 or $30 in a variety of cheap guides. I could have done flex and casting tests with them, and then used t
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Good luck, Jordan. I built my first rod a few months ago, and I'm working on my second, and have repaired a few of my production rods in between. I've run across some of the same things as you, and maybe I can help you avoid some of the mistakes I made. The first and strongest recommendation I can make for newbies like me and you is to go out and buy Tom Kirkman's book. I can't tell you how
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Perhaps others may disagree with me, but as a relative newbie to rodbuilding, I think that almost as satisfying as looking at a completed custom rod is being able to do repairs that in the past had to be sent to the tackle shop. I know for me, understanding the construction of a rod has removed a lot of the mystery and confusion about the process, and has allowed me -- even with my lack of experi
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I'm building a new surf rod, which will be a moderate-to-heavy (3-8 oz) bait stick and will be used with an Alvey reel. My surf rods go through some relatively rough handling (nothing extreme, but they get used a lot in some rough condidtions), so when I was putting together the rod's componets, instead of regular cork tape (1/16"), I went with heavy duty (1/8"). Now that I've begun
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With a grand total of one custom rod under my belt, I am probably inexperienced enough to be barred from commenting on this, but after completing my first custom rod, and having started my second, and having spent a great deal of time using what meager brainpower I have contemplating guide placement, I feel like I have to chime in. I think that to some exent, there will be some discrepancies i
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Thanks for the responses. I went home and looked through Tom Kirkman's book, and there was a section in there that dealt with this situation. Tom recommended using thick thread, and wrapping it just like a guide, and I think I'm going to try that. I do like the other ideas, though - one of things that I love about rodbuilding is that there are so many options, and none of them is "wrong,&quo
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First of all, I want to say thanks to Tom Kirkman for his wonderful book -- I loved it, and had a blast building my first custom rod, which was a surf rod. I'm building my second surf rod, and I have a stupid question about cork tape, which I didn't use on my first rod (I used EVA). The question is about basic reel/grip construction when using cork tape. From a conceptual standpoint, I thin
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