I recently uploaded a New Guide Concept layout video (for spinning rods)

Started by The Fishing Hobby, May 05, 2019, 04:29:50 PM

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The Fishing Hobby

Yeah that is right. A lot of the areas I fish in are shallow and very clear creeks. Keeping distance from the places that typically hold fish is important. On lakes...I'm lazy so it cuts down on some paddling  ;D

Jeri

Good explanation of the basic NGC, which generally works out for lighter and shorter rods, though the x27 aspect is worrisome, as it does not take into account the length of the rod blank, just which reel is being used.

Personally have looked at the NGC and the more advanced KRC from Fuji, and had lengthy correspondence with them over the adaptation of their concepts for log surf rods. The outcome, was to ignore some of the 'angle of reel spine' and 'x27' ideas, and try and understand what is actually happening with the braid when you are casting, how the circular aspect of the spirals coming off the reel, have huge energy when close to the reel, and that this energy dissipates the further you get away from the reel, so having your first guide too close to the reel, actually takes power and distance away from the cast, when trying to squeeze the coils into conforming to the small but high first guide.

On a typical 12' surf spinning rod that we build we have found the optimum position for the first guide to be between 50-70 inches from the reel seat, then the reduction guides closer than you indicate, followed by 5-6 small guides at the top. This we found gave optimum distance, which in the case of the 3oz version of this blank was about 130-140 yards when cast over grass.

We then took the same theory and extrapolated it up to 15' long rods, with slightly different guides being used, but still very high and relatively very small, and pushing the first guide even further r up to blank to about 80", and that worked a dream with a whole range of blanks, some sending 7oz test sinkers well over 200 yards, and absolutely silent conditions of the braid flowing over the guides.


This aspect of silence during the cast is a fairly 'unscientific' method of determining levels of friction between the braid and the guides, but what we found was that we could actually go down considerably on the size of the ring on the first guide to size 16 or 20, even for 50lb braid strengths, without any penalties on distance or line performance.


Subsequent to this, we have built a number of shorter spinning rods for clients, and the principle works equally well, with the distance to the first guide being considerably more than is suggested by the general wisdom of NGC or KRC formats. One 9' x 2oz rod for a guy fishing in the Okavango river for Tigerfish was so successful on the distance aspect, that it caused him a problem, standing in Namibia, his lures were landing in Angola, well over 100 yards away!!!


Ultimately, the NGC and KRC are not wrong, but there are some serious further developments from those basic concepts, with huge gains to be had, but more experimentation is needed.

The Fishing Hobby


The Fishing Hobby

Just an update, I finished the rod this week and tested it against my best casting 7.5' fiberglass ultralight rod and in my very unscientific tests, I'm getting between 5-10 extra yards consistently. The test was using the same reel and line on both rods and throwing a 1/8oz egg sinker from the same starting point using the same casting style. 5-10 yards may not sound like much, but when you start adding it up over an entire day on the water, that is a lot of paddling saved  ;D

I tried to match the colors on my thread wraps and amount of finish used to cover them because I was only removing and replacing two of the original guides.
It turned out pretty nice looking and I think it will be a nice rod to fish with.
The top section in each picture are the new guides and the lower section in each picture are the factory ones for comparison. The new ones have the higher framed guides.