I agree with Joe. It's often even better.
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hidden behind a rock, with a clear pool just a couple of yard away... take a grasshopper, put it on a simple hook. your rig is perfectly at ease with throwing 1 gram. the grasshopper falls right along the deep side of the pool, immediately a trout darts and takes it. the fight is on, and the fish has a chance... well, I certainly hope you'll experience this kind of pleasure with this rod. chee
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hi Michael. I don't think there will be any trouble with the knots on the kind of line you expect on an UL rig. Plus, on these very delicate things, I wouldn't recommend the use of leaders. spool your reel with 2 pounds test, and directly put a 00 mepps at the end, and you're good to go explore small streams under heavy cover. 4-5 feet UL are a standard in France for that kind of sport. we cal
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for all rods, and in particular for very light rods, any unecessary weight on the upper 1/3 is a big mistake, at least imho. for your project, I think 16/8/4/4/4/4 is what you want in order to retain as much as possible of the bare blank speed and to maximize sensitivity. it's not really a matter of distance, but a matter of well tuned instrument.
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Why don't you post the CCS measures of these blanks? I for one would be quite interested to know the figures.
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I have had excellent results with Mettler's Polysheen thread, and it has a very impressive color range. Obviously, some applications require color preserver, but others don't. For instance, Rust (ref. 1342) without CP will give you a close match to a Tiger Eye finish. A very pleasant thread to work with.
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Matthew: hopefully Emory or other more knowledgeable than I am will answer, but it strikes me that you're only testing for a single impulse and not for vibrations. In my experience, there are very noticeable difference in the way a single blank will convey the vibrations of the caudal of several different soft plastic lures. You'll probably find even sharper contrasts from blank to blank.
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Emory: thanks for your comments. A couple of questions: 1. Did you publish your definition and your empirical results somewhere? 2. have you any reason to suspect that guide geometry may affect sensitivity, other than because of the implied weight?
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Roger: I'm with you on this. I wasn't advocating post facto ratiocinations or wishful thinking, but rather CCF measurements. One of the advantages of such measures is that you can communicate them, and they are useful to others. properly conducted blind tests may also be usefu;, but are rather more complicated to run.
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Fantastic imput, Joe. Thanks! You, Roger and Mo made an important point, I for me at least it wasn't clearly articulated as such: sensitivity is not only about the transmission properties of the rod, but also about the way the rod affects the hand. In order to be a good transmitter of information, it needs to allow the hand to stay relaxed. Maybe it was obvious to everyone, but at least it was
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Craig: I certainly hope the topic is not already dead. Our attention span is not that short. At least I hope so. Roger: I agree with most of what you say. But look at it this way. A good fly rod is the one that suit your casting stroke, and let you do what you need to do with the line. Nonetheless, it was important to describe objective properties of the rod such as action and power, if only t
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ditto. (and imagine how it feels when you're not even on the same continent as most of the sources of knowledge!)
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thanks everyone for the imput. Thomas : as stated, I began with the search, but the problem wasn't the lack of answers, rather an overflow of inconsistant info Tom : yes, as stated, the central notion is stiffness/weight, or (my preference) stiffness/MoI Spencer/Emory/Eugene: thanks for the references, I'll check them asap Roger: I agree with your diagnostic but I have doubts about th
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I'd like to tap in the knowledge base of the forum I did some extensive search in the archives about rod sensitivity, and I must say that the results do not yield a very clear picture, at least for me. There are for instance some persistent assertions about guide numbers or guide height that are clearly not or ill grounded. As far as I understand the issue, sensitivity of a rod is the rod's
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"PermaGloss dries by contact with moisture." ^_^ I guess that's why one says it *cures*: intuitions about how things dry are misleading with those products.
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The blind test idea is great but somehow I doubt someone will do it. Accurate measures of CCF would probably give a very good indication of the difference, even if each one would still have to experiment a little to get a *personal* notion of the way a difference of x in CCF *feels*.
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If you are going to use spinners and spoons, you don't need a really fast rod as you would e.g. for jigs. A fast fly blank will do a wonderful job. I've been using them for years before falling for the fly bug. If you know how to play a fish, you don't need to go over gunned. A modern 7wt would already handle anything except the biggest fish, and an 8wt will be just perfect. Precisely because i
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«a spinning or conventional blank does not reach full casting efficiency until it "locks down"» this statement intrigues me. do you know where I can learn about that?
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I second everything Eugene suggests: 1. you certainly don't need #2, #1 or smaller would do very well 2. go light wire. I just finished a 6'6 3wt with Batson's light wires, and I am thrilled by the way these guides preserve the action of the bare blank. of course snakes are traditional and plenty of people like them, but on a light build, single foot are the way to go IMHO. 3. there cannot be
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Eugene, that's very interesting. I see how one would deem it inconsistent to put high end guides on a low end blank, but then, having actually tested one in two extensive lawn session, I can perfectly see how such an action would suit perfectly an angler's casting stroke. Were it be the case, there's nothing strange in choosing that blank and spending on the guides. What did you think of the
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a relatively new craze in Europe is to fish for carps using sturdy versions of these poles. I've seen it done a lot around here. It's quite fun to look at a 15lb carp fighting on such a rig, with 15 yards of elastic out... The fish has a lot of leverage.
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I've built a F906-4 that has been sent to me by error. Wanting to preserve as much of the blank frequency as I could, I put only 9 guides on it instead of the usual 10, the first five being #1 single foot. Let me tell you that rigged like that, it's a sweet rod. Here's the static test: and here are my detailed views about the rod Using #3 snakes on a 5wt is in my view way
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edit
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Tom: I just wanted to point out that it is indeed interesting to do thorough tests and publish them, and interesting also to read them and even to ask if there's more. I just want to gather as much info as I can before giving it a go, knowing full well that "go test it yourself" is the best advice anyone could give. Darrin: yes, we hopefully will see the MW available locally. I cert
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well, good people, that's without the arm and legs you have to depart with to have anything shipped this side of the pond, plus the very nasty feeling you may get if you were to realize that this MW set doesn't work the way you want on this particularly cool blank. very few pros on the forum I moderate, but plenty of rod builders eager to learn something about the stuff. I don't think it's entir
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Ken: am I right in assuming that when you tested the rods with your friend, each of you cast BOTH rods then you pooled the results? (sorry, I had to ask ^_^)
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thanks Ken, a very appreciated input
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Tom: well, that's a truly enlightening answer, thank you very much sir! Ray: I'm more a fly freak myself, and what you say is SO true for fly casting. Jim: in surfcasting and fly fishing rods, what you say is not totally accurate, since all out distance rigs are usually quite uneasy to handle. some can, but most can't. but I agree that everyone is looking for efficiency, and in most case a
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Tom, thanks a lot for sharing your much appreciated insights. now, I have a whole forum of French rod builders interested in that, so please allow me to ask a couple more questions. if I understood your point correctly, you say that a microwave rig compares with another reasonably efficient guide system in such a way that the difference is negligible. and at least for a specific setting, you
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Fantastic thread, extremely interesting!! Tom, do you think you would have equivalent results on heavy rods ? I agree that on can max out a casting system, but it's far easier on a light rod than on heavier builds. After all, competitive distance casting shows that you can build 13' surf rods that very few casters -- if any -- can max. In such configurations a microwave may make a difference. I
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