Types of Rods

[RowdyW]

Hi, I need some info, first why are rods spiral wrapped? Second why do some rods have more guides then others. As an example I see 7 ft. rods with 5, 7, or even 10 guides. I know its more expensive when using more guides. Is less guides better for casting? More guides better for hauling in big fish? Need to hear pro & cons on this from people who know rods. Also what is a acid wrapped rod?        Rudy

[Keta]

Spiral wrapping eliminate rod torque and makes fighting a fish easier.  With a conventional rod less eyes are needed on a stiffer rod.

[Bryan Young]

Oh where do I begin. I'll respond when I get on a computer. Cannot type so much on this little phone.

[Keta]

Bryan, do you use spiral wraped rods?  I fought it for years but after landing a 50lb-60lb rooster fish with one I now have 3, one my go to Pacific halibut rod.

[Bryan Young]

Lee, no, I don't have one because my favorite fishing rods have aftco lite roller guides and I love those rods.  But, I'll be making some rods in the future and they will probably be spiral.

Spiral - Helps give you leverage while fighting the fish as long as the guides spin opposite to the reel handle.  The rod will want to twist isn that direction, and will counter the weight and force of the reel as you are winding.

Number of guides - I for one like a lot of guides as long as the wraps are not too long.  This will help distribute the force across the blank equally.  Too little guides will create greater stress angles on the blank that leads to breakage.  I have yet had to repair any of the rods that I had build due to a break in the blank.  I will place guide for each blank even though the blank is the same model from the manufacture.  It's all about weight distribution and each blank is different like each person is different.  This is one of the reasons I got out of wrapping rods professionally.  Customer didn't understand why a set of 5 rods had different guide placements, and I will not wrap a rod with uniform guide placement based on the bend of one rod.  Sorry rod wrappers, I know you do things to meet your customers' expectations, and understand what you go through, but I am not that type of rod wrapper.  I'm sure your rods are not build in the same manner though.

Casting - for spinner reels and convention reel rods (not spiral), realistically, other than the guide placement, the guide heights are very important.  My 6' ultralight rod, for example, had 7 guides plus the tip.  All guides were extra high so the line coming off the reel barely touched the stripper guide.  And once I got the guide placement, the line only touch (as far as I could see), the tip as I casted.  No slap could be heard on the guides or the blank.  My best cast on a football field was 50 yard using 1/2 oz and 2# main line from my Penn 420SS reel.  All other store rods that I have, my best cast was 35-40 yards under the same conditions.  Casting rods, on a full spool, if you string the line through the rod, I like th e line to only tough the tip of the rod with exception to the side to side touches as the line moves from side to side.

In short, after guide placemnet, it's guide height that will help or hurt your casting distance.

I really need to wrap a spiral to see how it will affect my casting distance.  There is a guy up in Marin area I think that has developed a routing method that doesn't use guides until the line is on the underside of the blank.  I'm dying to see his rods, but have yet to find it.  It doesn't help that I cannot remember the maker's name.

[Ron Jones]

My childhood best friends dad was a wrapper, I still have one of his rods. His rule always made sense to me, the line shouldn't touch the blank. We would put a blank under load and move the eyes around with masking tape to keep the line off the blank under as much bend as we dared. This seemed to give the rods really solid lifting power on halibut and catfish.

Ron

[BMITCH]

Ron, I've used the acid warped rods for a couple of seasons now. They in general do not come close to casting distance as well as a conventional rod. Now I don't build my own, so I'm at the mercy of what is available. I use them for jigging from the boat or possibly chunking bait. The twist is greatly reduced when in a prolonged fight or at least it seems that way. I recently purchased one of the rods from Alan (Black Pearl) on this site and for the money it looks like a very nice rod. I have yet to fish it, but I'm confident that it will hold up. I hope to get a couple trips with it this fall and can't wait to test it out. I do see the advantages of the spiral wrapped rods, but like everything else in life it's a balance.

Bob

[Cone]

It was my good fortune to meet an old man a while back. He is a wealth of knowledge. He has been building rods for many years. He has built acid wrapped rods that he can cast at least as far as a regular rod. If not farther. I do know that a spiral wrapped rod will cast as well as a regular rod if it is done right.
      BTW. The turn acid wrap comes from someone saying "that person must have been on acid when he wrapped that rod". A spiral wrap does help in a long fight. Less so if a harness is used.
    Bob

[BMITCH]

Bob
Maybe that's the problem with my casting...I'm just not old enough yet.

Bob

[SoCalAngler]

Spiral/Acid wrapping rods is nothing new it has come and gone several times since about the late 50's. I have used a couple and don't really notice a difference in the twisting effect some claim it helps to prevent over my standard wrapped rods. All rods by their nature have a spline/spine and if rods are wrapped correctly and are matched to the right reel twisting should not be a problem. Lee, you fish for cow sized tuna, how many acid wrapped rods do you see on cow rods? It is my thought that if there was in fact a advantage to a twisting effect this would be the place where it would pay off the best, on cow sized tuna and I would think Long Rangers hunting cows would use them more than standard wrapped rods. On boats I have been on and people that I know that do hunt big fish don't use acid rods on them but some do use them on smaller fish.

Also could someone that wraps spiral rods answer this, do you start your guides on or off the rods spline when wrapping?

[Keta]

Lee, you fish for cow sized tuna, how many acid wrapped rods do you see on cow rods?

One, it was a Seeker 2x3.

[floating doc]

Reviving this thread: I'm going to build a jigging rod for my 112HN. I'm thinking of doing a spiral wrap. The last time I built a spiral wrapped rod was in 1982. I don't remember much about it, and it was a plugging rod for a pro tour bass fisherman.

How do you start with guide placement? 

[Ron Jones]

I understand that you set the spine on the bottom of the rod as per usual. the casting eyes will be oriented correctly added so will the spinners.

Ronald

[MarkT]

I've got two acid wrapped rods, both wrapped by J.Akuhed (Jim Racela) who came up with the term acid wrap. You get the stability benefits of a spinner using a conventional reel.  Also called a spiral, Roberts or revolver wrap. My rods are both Seeker Black Steels... a G6480 and a G6470. It's nice to just fight the fish and not the rod too.

[Jeri]

Hi Rudy,

I'll try to make this as straight forward as possible, rod building can be a huge number of compromises for different rod, and different people.

Spiral Wrapping:  Basically each rod blank has a natural spiral in its construction – the spiral layers of carbon or glass. This does introduce a small internal spiral torque effect – depending on which direction a particular manufacturer wraps his blanks. Then when we build a rod, either spine up or spine down, there is a further desire within the rod blank to twist round to ease the direction of the spine. In a spine up rod, this effect is minimised. Add to all this the offset power being exerted by the reel (conventional only), there can be a significant twisting effect to be felt – hence the possible benefits on a rod that has been spiral wrapped. The true extent of these forces can really only be felt with quite heavy boat rods that are doing some heavy lifting – and as someone has pointed out, can very easily be reduced by using a rod belt with a gimbel.

In some cases, by using spine alignment  - you can negate a lot of the twisting effect, when first building a rod. However, as spine alignment is rarely considered in any mass produced rods, it is why most custom rods will feel 'sweeter' than an identical factory built rod – getting the spine right for the design is a major issue. The rod with all the internal torque elements wants to pull round to the plane that is the easiest line for its internal structure – starting with a rod built with the spine to suit those internal torques builds a sweeter performing rod – build it on the opposite plane, and you will always have a rod fighting those internal torque issue.

Ring Spacing: The simplest schemes of spacing are basically a minimum number of rings so that the line follows the curve of the rod – when the rod is pulled over at near full working curve, and that the line doesn't touch the blank. However, and this is a big factor, there are numerous schemes and design ideas floating around now that change that earlier precept, as well as the size range of the guides. However, the original scheme does work exceptionally well for boat and heavy lifting rods. Another generalisation form the older schools of thought, is that fixed spool rods need less rings than conventional rods, as the reel is on the underside, however they (fixed spool) need larger guides to cope with the coils of line coming off the spool of the reel – this developed into the 'Cone of Flight' theory of guide placement, using the coils and working to gently and progressively reduce the coils in the line as they travel down the rod, to finally come out running in a straight line.

Casting Distance: We do a lot of work with distance issues on our rods, as we build a lot of surf rods, and distance is a major priority in the design, and we do build both conventional and fixed spool rods – so have developed some theories that work for us, and can equally be applied to some of the shorter designs of rod – boat casting or even rivers and the like. On fixed spool rods we use an adaptation of the Omura theory which basically uses high leg guides – which are sometimes called 'stand off', and use these very much like 'cone of flight', and that for a 12' surf rod will usually equate to about 6 guides, plus tip.

Just diverting a little at this point, there is a recent design theory which builds similar rods with 10 guides for a fixed spool reel, and we have been getting a serious number of these factory built rods though our workshop for rebuilds, in redesigning the guide layout back down to 6 guides, we are getting over 30% increase in distance. The 10 guide design is choking the smooth flow of line during the cast, by strangling the coils coming off the reel.

Onto Conventional rods, again there is a natural harmonic of line flow with the line coming off the reel during the cast, and our opinion is that it is best to work with this harmonic, rather than try in force it into some other flow pattern. Here you can now see why an 'acid wrapped' rod would not be able to work with the line harmonics for maximum distance casting. Our scheme of spacing for distance seems to add at last one extra guide over all the other designs that we see. Our most usual surf rods are 14' long, and built with the reel low down, we generally see rods coming from manufacturers and other custom rod builders with 7 or 8 guides, we nearly always end up with 9 or even 10 guides, and we certainly seem to get more distance – but then we also try to use slightly smaller guides than the norm, as guide weight can be a serious issue when looking at the performance of the blank, especially at the tip area, too many heavy guides and you kill the distance that might be achieved, through too much 'ring weight'.

Cost: You mentioned a possible cost implication. This is more to do with factory mass produced items where a factory might be producing 100's of rods per day, the unit cost of each rod will go up but the cost of guide, thread, resin and labour – however when building your own 'special', then the cost is nothing – except the difference between perfection and a rod that just 'does the job'.

So, in conclusion, a rod for fighting seriously heavy  fish has spine alignment to suit, where as a rod for casting distance, might need the spine to be used on the opposite side to get maximum power into the cast. Here is the huge compromise in the design issue between the two priorities, and at times 'acid wrapping' can balance out some of the issues. We can't often get manufacturers to change the core problem of the clockwise or anti-clockwise wrapped blanks – we have to best work with what they are producing, and some will have this inherent issue in their build.

Hope that helps


Cheers from sunny Africa

Jeri