Number of guides on a rod

[Brewcrafter]

I have heard it said (and tend to believe it, but have no reference evidence) that more rods have been broken by car doors, truck tail gates, ex-wives, and dock cleats than by fish (guilty, I lost an old Green Conolon trout rod on a dock cleat  ).  Another thought - I would put forth (again with no references) that a number of rods "broken" on fish actually were rods that may have been inadvertently damaged by rapping up against a gunwale, improperly stored, rolling around in the bed of the truck on the way to the dock, or otherwise took a sharp knock or concentrated blow that may not have outwardly shown signs of damage but did in fact affect the composite.  I know that OC Steve and Jurelometer Dave both have pretty extensive experience in the composite realm, and probably could speak with more knowledge.

and by the way, I love my interline rods where there are no guides, only the point in which the line enters the rod blank and a top that the line exits the rod blank.

Bryan - I would like to hear more about this.  My only experience with a "though rod" type of setup has been when I borrowed a buddies Sabiki rod on my last long range trip (and he was more than happy to let me borrow it - he drank beer and watched me catch bait  ) but I have never seen anything like that used elsewhere.  What I really liked about his Sabiki bait setup was that you could reel the rig up inside of the rod and toss it in the rack - and then use it again later without all the grief associated with trying to store one of those bait catching rigs. - john

[oc1]

rods "broken" on fish actually were rods that may have been inadvertently damaged by rapping up against a gunwale,

I know that OC Steve and Jurelometer Dave both have pretty extensive experience in the composite realm, and probably could speak with more knowledge.

What I know is from the school of hard knocks.... so to speak.  My rod holders allow the tip to slap against the gunwale when it gets rough.  There's no place else to put them.  I've broken a half-dozen rods in about as many years.  They always break near the tip in the middle of a cast after thousands of similar casts.

There is a certain type of blank that is much more prone to breaking in my hands.  They are black graphite with a satin finish, made in China (possibly all from the same factory) and sold under names like Rainshadow, or Batson, or Alps or unbranded and sold on the internet by places like Mud Hole, GetBit or anonymous ebay sellers.  They are very inexpensive, very light, with good action, and are a terrific deal if you don't break it..  I think they must use a really high modulus carbon fiber and are so brittle that they cannot handle being slapped around.  St. Croix and Lamiglass graphite blanks and all the old fiberglass tobacco blanks hold up very well for me.  Never broke one.  But, fiberglass is really heavy.  St.Croix or Lamiglass graphite are somewhat heavier and cost about four times more.  

-steve

[Bryan Young]

Bryan - I would like to hear more about this.  My only experience with a "though rod" type of setup has been when I borrowed a buddies Sabiki rod on my last long range trip (and he was more than happy to let me borrow it - he drank beer and watched me catch bait  ) but I have never seen anything like that used elsewhere.  What I really liked about his Sabiki bait setup was that you could reel the rig up inside of the rod and toss it in the rack - and then use it again later without all the grief associated with trying to store one of those bait catching rigs. - john

John,

If I can ever make it down there, I'll gladly bring a few rods down.  We could go down to the surf and cast away and hopefully you could catch something to see why I love interline rods.  That, and there is no way to foul snag another one's line of my guides as we weave through each other on a boat when fighting a fish.

[jurelometer]

There was a company that made through-blank rods for teasing billfish for fly fishers.   

They troll around a typical spread of lures, but without hooks.  When a billfish starts whacking a lure,   The lures are all wound in , and a deckhand casts  a rigged hookless  bait on the teaser rod.  You want the billfish to almost eat the bait and then you yank it away and out of the water.  A rod without guides comes in handy here.

On a side note:  As soon as the bait is pulled out of the water, the captain takes the motor(s) out of gear, and the angler flops the fly right where the bait was pulled out.   All this happens within 30 feet of the transom.  Even though the boat is still moving, and the cast is more of a lob than a real cast with the fly being dragged by the boat when the fish eats,  this somehow counts as a legal cast-fly caught fish and not trolling for the purposes of IGFA records, and self congratulations.   

Getting back on topic,  I would think that the problem with through-blank rods is that there is no way to control the line rubbing on the inside of the blank, and since blanks are built inside to outside around a mandrel, there really is no way to line a rod to avoid wear  that is both durable and not detrimental to rod action. Braid probably makes this worse.

rods "broken" on fish actually were rods that may have been inadvertently damaged by rapping up against a gunwale,

I know that OC Steve and Jurelometer Dave both have pretty extensive experience in the composite realm, and probably could speak with more knowledge.

What I know is from the school of hard knocks.... so to speak.  My rod holders allow the tip to slap against the gunwale when it gets rough.  There's no place else to put them.  I've broken a half-dozen rods in about as many years.  They always break near the tip in the middle of a cast after thousands of similar casts.

There is a certain type of blank that is much more prone to breaking in my hands.  They are black graphite with a satin finish, made in China (possibly all from the same factory) and sold under names like Rainshadow, or Batson, or Alps or unbranded and sold on the internet by places like Mud Hole, GetBit or anonymous ebay sellers.  They are very inexpensive, very light, with good action, and are a terrific deal if you don't break it..  I think they must use a really high modulus carbon fiber and are so brittle that they cannot handle being slapped around.  St. Croix and Lamiglass graphite blanks and all the old fiberglass tobacco blanks hold up very well for me.  Never broke one.  But, fiberglass is really heavy.  St.Croix or Lamiglass graphite are somewhat heavier and cost about four times more. 

-steve

Steve has actually messed with building blanks from scratch,  I am just making stuff up .

But I did read that while the material science types make some distinctions about when to use the words graphite vs carbon when discussing fibers, the words are pretty much interchangeable when used to market fishing rods.  They are all built from off the shelf carbon fiber weave, with only the resins doctored for fishing rod usage.

I think that wall thickness that is the controlling factor.  Glass and carbon fibers do not stretch much, it is the resin that is elastic and allows the fibers to move around, which is why the blank can bend without breaking.  Since carbon fibers are stiffer than glass, less fibers are needed to reach the desired  stiffness for a given rod. While this makes the rod lighter and more lively,  less fibers with less resin means that it takes less damage or deformation  for enough fibers to detach from the resin for the rod to go kablooie. 

But it is not just damage from blank abuse. High stick failures are a real thing.  I have seen fly rods blow up (break in multiple locations at the same time) more than once.

From time to time, fly rod makers will come out with super lightweight high performance rod for big bucks (like over $1000 USD),  but they generally lose favor over time, as they break almost as easily as the low-end low lightweight  cheapies that Steve refers too (I do like Rainshadow blanks for the record, and their customer support has treated me well- quality control does not seem as good as the super expensive brands, but all lightweight blanks tend to break).

The improvements  that go into higher end rods ( beyond better quality control) are in the resins where various powders and magic pixie dust is added to the resin that goes into the weave or outer coating.  The goal here is to improve the strength of resin attachment to fibers , and mebbe changing the elastic properties (not sure about this part).   The coating additives are used to make the surface more resilient to impact damage.  Think about this before sanding down a high end blank.  Coatings are less common, but they are still out there.

The adds we see about  nano-technology rods are usually referring to the stuff that they put  in the resin, as opposed to using actual nano fibers, which are still sort of expensive to make.   Whether these "nano"  powders do more for marketing performance than fishing performance, I have no clue. 

-J

[day0ne]

There is a certain type of blank that is much more prone to breaking in my hands.  They are black graphite with a satin finish, made in China (possibly all from the same factory) and sold under names like Rainshadow, or Batson, or Alps or unbranded and sold on the internet by places like Mud Hole, GetBit or anonymous ebay sellers.  They are very inexpensive, very light, with good action, and are a terrific deal if you don't break it..  I think they must use a really high modulus carbon fiber and are so brittle that they cannot handle being slapped around.  St. Croix and Lamiglass graphite blanks and all the old fiberglass tobacco blanks hold up very well for me.  Never broke one.  But, fiberglass is really heavy.  St.Croix or Lamiglass graphite are somewhat heavier and cost about four times more.  

-steve

I totally disagree with this. Rainshadow or Batson (Batson is the company, Rainshadow is the blank) are high quality blanks, and not that cheap.  I put them up against Seekers and Calstars. Definitely not "brittle". BTW, Alps makes rod components, not blanks.

[Cor]

I have heard it said (and tend to believe it, but have no reference evidence) that more rods have been broken by car doors, truck tail gates, ex-wives, and dock cleats than by fish (guilty, I lost an old Green Conolon trout rod on a dock cleat  ).  Another thought - ........................ - john

I have probably broken 6 or 7 rods during my fishing life........one when trying to dislodge a lure stuck on the bottom and the rest all when "throwing" a fish on to shore.   This is actually more lifting a fish on to a boat or rock.   When done correctly with the type of rod most of us use it is possible to throw a fish of up to about 18 pounds.   It is called "throwing" because you need to propel the fish with some momentum out the water with a fluid swinging action using the backbone of the rod.
High modulus graphite is especially prone to break when doing this.

95% of rods break by high sticking.

[JasonGotaProblem]

Also there's some variety out there for through-blank rods available for sale.

Yes thats a real listing.

[Jeri]

To the original posters' first question, a lot of commercial products are built to 'suit the markets perceptions' and invariably built down to a price point. Meaning that the longer surf rod has been built to suit the perceived customer requirements - big guides and not too many, it has nothing to do with performance.

Building a lot of long surf rods for our local market down here, we have over the years found that 'rules' and 'recipes' for rod designs should only be taken as guidence at best, for as no rules ever apply truly to every situation. A point in case, we build a lot of 14'long surf rods and accordingly whether for use with conventional or spinner reels, we have found that 9 guides can give optimum performance for our blanks, but equally both rods would be built on a totally different schemes of layout.

There are just too many variations in fishing rod types and applications and lengths and actions for any rules to ever become set in stone.

[Cuttyhunker]

As long as there's on on the tip like the old long bamboo poles that never had a reel I'd give it a go.

[smnaguwa]

J - thanks for the info. In-line rods are popular in Asia. I have a Shimano in-line rod I use shore fishing for stripers. I have wondered how durable they are. How much "grooving" of the inside of the rod is happening? I don't use regular braided line but use fused PE line like Nanofil.

[jurelometer]

J - thanks for the info. In-line rods are popular in Asia. I have a Shimano in-line rod I use shore fishing for stripers. I have wondered how durable they are. How much "grooving" of the inside of the rod is happening? I don't use regular braided line but use fused PE line like Nanofil.

Ahh,  they call them interline rods.  Now I have the proper terminology.  

The only thing that I could come up with was a giant stainless steel tapered coil spring crammed up inside the blank.   Mebbe even  nested into the mandrel before wrapping the weave.  If the mandrel had a spiral groove, you could unscrew the finishished blank off the mandrel, and the spring would be held in place on the blank by the resin,  with just the right amount of metal exposed.

But  I thought that this would still  be too problematic.   Line grooving wear is the obvious problem.  Having lots of coils spreads out the load, decreasing wear on an individual coil, UNLESS, the rod has a fast taper which would concentrate load on a couple of coils.  And  normal rods usually tend to be pretty thin toward the tip to minimize inertia/recoil  (the tip waving back and forth when releasing the cast).  And the tip section typically bends quite a lot.  There has to be too many compromises toward the tip section of the rod - larger diameter to accommodate the metal coil and exit hole and possibly knot passing, a heavy through-hole tip top, more weight from the metal coil, and so on.  Oh, and also, the metal coil  is going to impart its own action, which is a bit hard to control, as the  wire  diameter has to be large enough to keep the line from rubbing on the blank, and fatigue is going to make the spring tension decrease over time at a different rate than the rest of the blank (probably faster).

So the blank design for this rod, has to be a slower action, with a more consistent bend, and the tip is going to be especially heavy and on the slow side.

But it looks like Daiwa could not come up with anything better.   Somewhere around the midpoint of this video, there are a few words and a diagram that looks pretty much  like what I described above, along with copious amounts of marketing "fertilizer" couched as technology. "Water shedding" blah blah blah...



There are other disadvanges, including the aforementioned inability to inspect for wear, inability to replace worn "coils", difficulty cleanining, threading, passing knots and tangles, more friction during the cast.  The list goes on.  (There must be some sort of giant threading tool to simplify threading the line from the entry to exit orifice?)

So what are the advantages?

No guides to break when transporting or fishing.

No guides to tangle on your terminal tackle.

May be cheaper to manufacture in large volume.

Looks cool to some folks.

Couldn't really come up with anything else.  I don't buy the "performance advantage from not having guides" argument.  The interline rod has one humongous coil guide fighting the action of the blank from entry orifice to exit orifice.
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These type of rods make the most sense where the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. I could be wrong, but I think ther is a lot of drop-fishing with multi-hook sabiki rigs in Japan and parts of Asia.  Not just for bait catching  like  we do here in the USA.   Here, you are not casting, a slow soft rod is what you want to keep fish from coming off the hook, and you are not catching big fish that will heavily load the rod and take line.  And anybody who has fished a sabiki rig with a "normal"  rod knows what a pain sabikis are for tangling in the guides.

Another  case that comes to mind are the bass boat guys that lay out a bunch of rigged rods on the carpeted deck, so that they can switch lures from cast to cast.  Most bass casts ar pretty short distance, And bass don't pull very hard.

There are probably other cases, and if folks simply just like fishing with these rods, that is reason enough to use them. But looking strictly from a  technology perspective, I just see this type of design as having some inherent challenges that put it at a disadvantage.  

-J

[smnaguwa]

Thanks for the info J. I think it is popular in Japan as shore fishing from rocks is very common there. It is also windy and the interline rod eliminates the "line slap" or line bowing when using the ~4m(13ft) spinning rods with light line. It may also help with the precison casting needed as guides affects the aerodynamics of the rod. The soft action makes it tough fighting the fish but the length of the rod is necessary to land the fish among the rocks even with very long landing nets. They come with a fine coiled line threading wire .