Hi all,planning my first build. looking to build a 15kg stoker/ tuna style 5'6" to 6 foot long rod for sharking in my boat matched to a tld 25.Already have a combo that has served me well for 10years but the rod is getting pretty tired so thought i would have a crack a making my own.After some research and advice from a fellow A.T brother I thought that I had made some decisions on some things regarding the build.After ringing a custom builder that supplies rodbuilding components etc I am now not sure.Here goes.
Was going to underbind in black A thread with metalic trims in A also.Overbind with black D thread.The rod builder said that there is no need to use A as it is a solution to a no existant problem.What are your thoughts?
Also had intended to cover whole rod and bindings with epoxy.He recomend not doing that as it creates more problems then it solves.He said just do bindings as the blanks come with coatings from the manufacture.Have not made my mind up on blanks yet but will be glass.Maybe a calstar eglass 6455 if I can afford it.Any help be magic.
Just had a look on mud hole and the calstar 6455 is 74$ here in Australia I got a price for 210$.ouch.
In answer to the blank question, most blanks come factory coated with protective coatings, whether paint of paint under a resin type coating. Leave that intact, and just whip and resin where the guides are placed.
As to whipping and resin over the entire blank, you will severely alter the action of the blank, and most certainly change the flexibility.
As to whippings, under whipping with A thread has no detriment, other than you will need loads more than if you used thicker D thread. We tend to build all rods with D thread, and only much lighter rods with A thread - say ultra light spinning rods. Visually, and performance wise, the D thread is perfectly suitable.
Hope that helps
Cheers from sunny Africa
Jeri
Thanks Jeri,
Thanks for the advice.Reread my post and realised I worded some of it a bit wrong.I meant just coating the whole rod with epoxy finish.Not whiping and coating the whole rod.I have much to learn.Cheers
Naw, we know what you meant. if you go black over black it won't matter, but sometimes using A under and D over works nicely because the overwrap wont bite into the under, being larger, and leave a sliver of color showing. I have used flex coat light as an over coat of the whole rod on a refurbish but only do so on heavy glas blanks. Should you choose to coat whole blank, especially new, Voodoo Rods makes a finish for this or you might use a couple coats of varnish which is very much lighter.
Also, if you can stand to be rodless for a minute, you might take your "tired" rod down to the blank, paint it, and wrap that one as practice. Highly recco you practice your epoxy technique on something old first to get the hang of it, so you don't end up with sags or gaps. Key point: DON'T just put the finish and leave it be to turn overnight....you should keep an eye on it here and there the first couple hours so you can smooth where it gaps around guide feet, and pop the air bubble at the edge of the brace that will squeeze out as the threads saturate with epoxy.
My 0.02 learned the hard way :)
John
I almost always do an under wrap unless it's an untra light rod and a tiny bit of weight matters, A will work fine just will take longer to wrap especially if you're turning it by hand. Keep the coating just for the guides, no point putting it on the blank, it will peei and yellow with time. You might want to strip and wrap and old rod first and get the hang of it. $210 is crazy, keep looking, there's bound to be something comprable down there
Cheers, would like to redo the old rod but was not real sure on how hard/costly it would be to respray.Can pressure cans work? Has to have flexing agents in paint right? Maybe paint for bumpers? Intend to practice practice practice everything. Still yet to build myself a stand and thread holder.Have started piecing bits and bobs together.Scott
Underwraps used to be a bigger deal than they seem to be now. Theory always was the underwrap would cushion the guide feet and perhaps prevent any rough edge on the bottom of the foot from biting into the blank. Trend seems to be no underwrap, except on heavier use rods, which might be what you're contemplating anyway.
I'm with thorhammer on an "A" underwrap with "D" wrap over. Hard to wrap a finer thread over a coarser one because the finer thread tends to "fall" into the grooves of the underlying coarser one, leaving the underwrap to show through. Wouldn't make much difference I guess if both threads the same color. Not sure I see a problem with same size threads on both wraps, especially if they're the same color.
I, too, see no value to coating the whole blank with anything, in a modern blank build.
Good luck and let us know of progress.
Frank
I like the "A" thread for the underwraps and do use them for all rods except fly and ultralight. Depending on the guides and how much stress the rod will be going thru, I've usually double wrapped the guides. I give them one wrap of "D" and a coat of finish and then the same color but size"A" over that. Just make sure you let the finish harden up for a few days before the second wrap. I've found that in the long run it will help with the cracking at the guide feet and as long as the 1st coat of finish isn't too thick it doesn't make the wraps look too bulky. I've even triple wrapped a bunch of rods for the commercial tuna guys. They bend, they last, and they don't complain. I'd use a good 2 part epoxy finish and stay away from the sprays.
Hope this helps.
Dave
Just a hypothetical question.
In the past heavy duty game rods were under whipped and then over whipped, sometimes even double overwhipped. Basically, historically this would have been for strength, as the strength of the varnish they were using for thread work was not that strong.
However, today we have seriously strong resins, like Flexcoat, where the strength of the resin is probably considerably stronger than the thread. To the point, that it is conceivably possible to actually just resin a ring or roller onto a blank - not very pretty, but certainly strong. Just a single wrapping of thread to reinforce the resin, should in theory be stronger than the double whipping and varnish of days or old.
So, why do we persist with double whipping, and what is the benefit of under whipping when rings or rollers are all on the top side of the rod??
Just a question - or am I missing some thing?
Old habits die hard for fisherman. If I build a 7' rod it better have 8 guides on it, doesn't matter that a static test shows it only needs 6. Same with wrapping, the under wrap isn't really nessecary but no ones buying it without it.
Jeri, I can almost agree with you on the strength of the resins BUT, if a commercial tuna guy has a fish on over 96" and looses it because a guide wrap fails, I don't want to be the guy he is going to yell at. Anybody's rod for that fact. They come to you to build a decent rod that will perform for decades so I will over build it for them.
Dave
I can agree with the sentiment for 'extreme' commercial rods, and perhaps a few outright heavy tuna sticks aimed purely at Bluefin, however for most other situations, the build becomes overkill.
The flexibility that the blank designer built into the blank is severely compromised by all the 'hard points' created by excessive rings and under whipped and over whipped rollers. The line of thinking that I am following, is that it is that very flexibility that is going to tire any big or medium fish out, once you have taken drag settings and line strength out of the equation.
We have recently been doing some work with some seriously strong surf rods, designed to cast sinker and bait combinations of in excess of 16oz, and we have found that the traditional route of multiple 2 foot rings were more than adequate. Then as a pure experiment, we built a rod using some 2 foot and single foot rings. The power and casting ability of the experimental rod was way over the traditional design - almost a 10% gain in casting distance and certainly more power available in the rod.
In trying to answer the question why??? The only answer seemed to be that the reduction of stiff points around the curve of the rod was allowing the true power of the rod blank to come back into the equation. I'm certainly not suggesting single leg guides on a tuna rod, but more thought towards the strength of materials we have today, and how much potential power we are masking or losing with over building.
Just my idle thoughts.
Cheers from sunny Africa
Some interesting thoughts coming in.Maybe alot of it comes down to where percieved strength comes from and also old habitsdo die hard.If something has worked for people they generaly won't start changeing things.For my build think will underbind in A and 1 overbind in D.And just epoxy the guides not the full rod.Have recently learned about rail rods for tuna and how longrange tuna guys are going to 8ft rods using 80lb plus gear.Here in oz there is no way you would find rods like that on a boat.Maybe in ten years as we seem to be a bit behind.We only just start to get hollow core braid on the shelves.Scott
When John, Frank, and Sheridan give advice on rod building you would be very wise to listen. All have considerable experience and very good building skills. JMO....but I listen to what they have taught me and done very well.......Bill
Thanks Bill, but I'm just a tinkerer compared to the other guys weighing in here. I just know what missteps I've made, and every rod teaches something new, especially a refurb job.
Earlier in this thread, ScottOz asked about painting his blank.
This may help with an answer. (on page 2). http://alantani.com/index.php?topic=7298.15
Cheers.had a good read of that thread.makes it sound easy.will have to do more research and see what I can turn up.Did see somewhere that the paint used for car bumpers and plastics works.
Quote from: Jeri on May 29, 2018, 12:25:58 PM
Just a hypothetical question.
In the past heavy duty game rods were under whipped and then over whipped, sometimes even double overwhipped. Basically, historically this would have been for strength, as the strength of the varnish they were using for thread work was not that strong.
However, today we have seriously strong resins, like Flexcoat, where the strength of the resin is probably considerably stronger than the thread. To the point, that it is conceivably possible to actually just resin a ring or roller onto a blank - not very pretty, but certainly strong. Just a single wrapping of thread to reinforce the resin, should in theory be stronger than the double whipping and varnish of days or old.
So, why do we persist with double whipping, and what is the benefit of under whipping when rings or rollers are all on the top side of the rod??
Just a question - or am I missing some thing?
Jeri, your posts are a wealth of information. Cheers from the Mojave Desert.
Deconstructed rods prove there is a mirror image bed under each guide foot, a hard knot of glue and thread that act as a socket for each foot, just like bedding a rifle. The underwrap pads the gel coat and supports the bed.
Quote from: GClev on December 21, 2018, 03:55:37 PM
Quote from: Jeri on May 29, 2018, 12:25:58 PM
Just a hypothetical question.
In the past heavy duty game rods were under whipped and then over whipped, sometimes even double overwhipped. Basically, historically this would have been for strength, as the strength of the varnish they were using for thread work was not that strong.
However, today we have seriously strong resins, like Flexcoat, where the strength of the resin is probably considerably stronger than the thread. To the point, that it is conceivably possible to actually just resin a ring or roller onto a blank - not very pretty, but certainly strong. Just a single wrapping of thread to reinforce the resin, should in theory be stronger than the double whipping and varnish of days or old.
So, why do we persist with double whipping, and what is the benefit of under whipping when rings or rollers are all on the top side of the rod??
Just a question - or am I missing some thing?
Jeri, your posts are a wealth of information. Cheers from the Mojave Desert.
Deconstructed rods prove there is a mirror image bed under each guide foot, a hard knot of glue and thread that act as a socket for each foot, just like bedding a rifle. The underwrap pads the gel coat and supports the bed.
The mirror image of resin is actually a sign of a well built rod, where the finishing resin has been fully and properly applied. The question now is that will the strengths of the resin in an adhesive manner, and a single wrap of thread over the top of the ring - this should be more than enough to hold any guide or roller in place. In the old days the thread did most of the work as we were only using the likes of varnish to protect and lock the threads in place. Now we have super strength resins, additional layers of threads become not only redundant, but will actually contribute a negative affect to the performance of the blank.
In recent months we have been doing a lot of development work on our very long surf rods, and found that by changing a lot of the upper guides to single leg guides, in place of double leg guides, we are gaining a huge amount of performance - up to 10% increase in distance or more. Though we are not looking at this as 'found' performance, but releasing the problem of 'hard points' of the double leg guides that were restricting the performance of the blank.
If we are liberating performance from our rods in this manner, how much can be liberated from other designs, by not over building??
Just a question to stimulate the little grey cells.
Cheers from sunny Africa.
What kind of single foot guides are you using Jeri? I'd like to give it a try. I'm thinking you're going with a single foot from the point where the rod starts to bend?
Thanks for all your posts, you push the envelope there a lot more than us Yanks on this side of the planet.
Sheridan
Quote from: happyhooker on May 28, 2018, 08:20:21 PMHard to wrap a finer thread over a coarser one because the finer thread tends to "fall" into the grooves of the underlying coarser one, leaving the underwrap to show through.
Wrap them in opposite directions and it's a lot easier.
Quote from: Swami805 on December 22, 2018, 02:17:42 PM
What kind of single foot guides are you using Jeri? I'd like to give it a try. I'm thinking you're going with a single foot from the point where the rod starts to bend?
Thanks for all your posts, you push the envelope there a lot more than us Yanks on this side of the planet.
Sheridan
We only use Fuji, so KTAG or KTSG, depending on the application. We started with some KR Concept guides on the long surf rods, and they proved a little too fragile for some of our anglers, so we now have a hybrid combination of Low Riders and KT guides, to replicate the KR Concept, and still get the performance improvement - about +10% on distance. Makes rods with full KW guides look archaic on the performance scale - too heavy and restrictive on the casting action.
Taking the discussion a stage further, we recently did a fairly definitive investigation into the effects of guides on surf rods. We had a couple of factory built rods that we also had the identical blank. The factory had followed the Fuji wisdom on spacing KW guides, and used a full set up the entire length of the long surf rods, which wasn't wrong as they were pretty much following what every other manufacturer is doing.
We took our own ideas on performance of the blank, and applied our Low Rider/KT hybrid guide system, and built the blanks to the same specification of other materials, like Fuji graphite reel seats and Winn Grip handles.
Then we weighed the completed rods, and found that our system offered a considerable saving on these 15' one piece rods, something in the region of 130 grams or 4oz in 'old money'. However, the real difference happened when we got to the casting field. Using the same 'more than competent' caster, same reel and braid, same sinker, we did a couple of test casts and then 3 serious 'all out' cast with both variations. The difference was staggering, while we were getting near 140 metres with the factory rod as an average, as soon as we started with the hybrid guide rods we saw a huge difference. Firstly the ease with which the rods loaded during the cast, and then the final results - the average for 3 casts was just over 175 metres - just over 100' further with the hybrid guides. Even to the point where one of our lady anglers took a couple of casts and managed to drop the 7oz sinker at 155 metres.
The conclusions were obvious, but the implications are more serious, in that rod manufacturing companies are now uniformly producing finished rods that are under achieving by 20% of their potential, even with an identical blank. And while the general purchasing public have been lead to believe that these new guides are the 'bee's knee', they are being mislead. But also, there is the aspect of the general purchasing public 'asking' or 'demanding' that these 'new components should be seen on the new products.
It is all a little like boat rods being built with acid wrap guides, very few manufacturers are brave enough to offer their buying public something that offers a dramatic improvement in performance, because of 'public perceptions'.
Just something to think about when embarking on a new rod build.
Cheers from sunny Africa
Thanks for the detailed explanation Jeri, I have a few blanks to build for next spring, a 10' glass graphite composite and a 13' all glass blank. I'll have to do a little load testing to get the spacing right I'm thinking since I'll get a little more flex in the blank. Should be fun, Thanks again Sheridan
really informative thread.
thanks guys.
Quote from: Jeri on May 29, 2018, 04:38:18 PM
..................
In trying to answer the question why??? The only answer seemed to be that the reduction of stiff points around the curve of the rod was allowing the true power of the rod blank to come back into the equation. I'm certainly not suggesting single leg guides on a tuna rod, but more thought towards the strength of materials we have today, and how much potential power we are masking or losing with over building.
Just my idle thoughts.
Cheers from sunny Africa
glad I found this thread (again), I in the process to rebuild/restoring a short surf rod that came stock with 5+1 guides, its a Tica UGMA 7ft rod that I bought for cheap cuz it had 2 broken guides (1st and 3rd guide) and 1" from the tip, suposedly Tica company use their propietary TC2 graphite blank so, to take advantage of this blank my idea was to build it again using just the 5 stock guides, I was like my compadre Sheridan, I used to install 1 guide per foot and some time one more just to have a more "cosmetic" flow on the curve specially if it was for a casting rod.
Quote from: Swami805 on May 29, 2018, 12:48:51 PM
Old habits die hard for fisherman. If I build a 7' rod it better have 8 guides on it, doesn't matter that a static test shows it only needs 6. Same with wrapping, the under wrap isn't really nessecary but no ones buying it without it.
But this time I will follow Jeri advices and try it by myself on a personal rod,
even when the static test shows that it might need at least 1 more guide to have a more smooth curve when loaded the blank lifting a 12# weights, the idea is to have the less stiff points on the blank and let it do the work on the fish and when casting lures, this is an spinning rod so, I think its not that critical than installing 1 guides less on a casting rod.
I will be installing some PacBay DP Ti guides that I already have to make the rod light and strong, since its 7ft long and pretty light I will use it from time to time as an inshore rod too, more in another thread when I have it finished.
Scott, or any one else looking for quality blanks in Australia I will reccomend United Composites.
The prior owner Peter Williams is from Australia & still resides there. Been a while but last time I checked he still is receiving shipments of UC Blanks.
I make no claims of being an expert rod builder. That said some things I've noticed are many rods made by custom builders are over built. This is what many buyers expect. Regardless of how well you show or explain it not being necessary.
Most rods maybe over half used for salt water would do just fine with Fugi MN's or a lesser strength guide.
Like Jerry has stated the heavier guides along with double wrapping robs the blank of performance.
I have an 8' CE Wahoo thats acid / spiral wrapped. First 3 guides are double foot all the rest are single foot guides. This is a slow parabolic blank. The performance of this rod casting & fighting fish is noticeably better than the same blank with all double foot guides.
This is the only instance where I've noticed a difference using Randy's blanks with an acid wrap. I believe it has more to do with the single foot guides than the acid wrap.
I've ran this rod with fish on at 20 lbs. of drag & slightly more. It's lite weight & a joy to use. However it needs more testing... Jeff
I rebuilt one of my favorite 15-20lb rods, a Calstar GX9 and used all single foot guides for all the running guides. I used a single layer for A thread and light epoxy. The rod is paired with my trusty Calcutta TE300. Used it pretty much all day last Tuesday throwing 5/8 plastics. Much lighter and improved distance considerably from the way it was before. Thanks Jeri for taking the time to post, made one of my favorite rods even better
Thanks for the comments guys, but we have been 'playing' again.
With our Low Rider/KR hybrid system on the long surf rods, we started to question the validity of starting the train with a size 20 - yes the actual height of the guide was essential to make it all work with the spinners, but could we go smaller, and reduce the end train further? The thought of firing 35lb braid and 100lb braid leader through size 8 guides was a little troublesome, but let's try.
The results just further confirmed that further weight reduction on the working part of the blank, just liberated more suppressed performance that we had previously been losing or masking with heavier and stiffer guides. 100lb braid casting leader through size 8 guides - went like a dream - still near silent during power casts, which personally I take as a sign of least friction. So, getting the guide train to work properly with the format of reel and blank - and the results just knock the factory concepts out of the window.
Something else that we have found, is that by moving the starting point for the first guide further and further up the long surf rods, we seem to get more and more distance - up to as point! Starting off with the first guide at 72", then incrementally moving it 6" further up with each test design, we found that distance was improving, however what we also found was that the sheer power of the rod with fish on reduced slightly with each incremental movement up the rod. Basically a 'trombone' effect with power/backbone being offset against distance.
At the end of the day, it is all very interesting work and just builds on the mental database of how rod performance can be seriously enhanced but avoiding the more conventional thinking patterns.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and knowledge. This is very interesting. We all can learn more from someone. Thankful me.🤙
Quote from: Jeri on April 26, 2019, 06:31:41 AM
Thanks for the comments guys, but we have been 'playing' again.
With our Low Rider/KR hybrid system on the long surf rods, we started to question the validity of starting the train with a size 20 - yes the actual height of the guide was essential to make it all work with the spinners, but could we go smaller, and reduce the end train further? The thought of firing 35lb braid and 100lb braid leader through size 8 guides was a little troublesome, but let's try.
At the end of the day, it is all very interesting work and just builds on the mental database of how rod performance can be seriously enhanced but avoiding the more conventional thinking patterns.
its always nice to find this kind of posts, where a professional rod builders share his knowleage and even more nice to find that what I was going to "try out" its already tested and working, the surf rod I was talking about in my previous post came with a 40 size big ring guide, but since it was broken Im switching it for a 25 guide size for striper guide, the reasoning is just like Jeri said, with 30-40braid line you dont need those big 40 ring size guide that were used for monoline because of the stiffer coils from the spinning reel spool, my intention is to be used with a 4000 sized reel with 40# braid.