The handles, butts and tiptops are glued to the blank. The process when building rods from now on change character. From grabbing hold on things it’s time to show a gentle touch and fine motor skills.
Rod guides comes in a variety of shapes and material and they play an essential part how your rod going to perform in the end. Not only how they are design but where you place them on your blank makes difference. I been messing a lot with rod guides trying to understand how they impact a rods performance and when it comes to fly rod guides I’ve saddle for a couple of things.
I prefer the American pattern snake rings, those with an oval shape. They are strong, keeps the fly line centered in the guide and preventing line from touching the blank too much. Now there’s nothing wrong with single legged rings but those times when I tested fly rods with single legged guides they seemed less effective. The fly line had a tendency to cling to the blank when casting and create more friction. Now, that’s only my experience and if you like them and the idea of a single guide who will save you a couple of grams in less wrapping and rod finish, those guides are for you.
There's some companies that manufacture guides for fly rods. For this build I choose Saymo guides from H&H company in Great Britain. They are known to stand up to really harsh environments and salty waters. And as my two rods are expected to be used in saltwater they will suite me just fine.
Another thing when talking of fly rod guides is what size you should choose for your build. My experience tells me, keep them as small as possible. Maybe your rod wan't cast longer than using larger guides but perform more controlled with higher precision. And thereby feel more easy and pleasant to cast.
For my build of a six weight rods I picked size 1 running guides down to a “chocker” of 4 size and a 12 mm stripper guide. I could have used the 1/0 size running guides but with the risk of leader knot problems. So the 1 sized running guides will likely work great.
And another thing I’m going to test this time is lighter guides in the top of the rod. What I hopefully gaining by keeping the tip of the rod as unaffected as possible are a responsive and light feel when casting. The down side could be that they ware out and I have to replace them long before the pension day of the rod. Only time will tell.
Enough said about that, I can hardly wait to cast my rods but first I will do a static test to decide where to place my guides to be as effective as possible.
The static test is time consuming but if done right you will get a rod that cast at it's full potential. The other way around, when the guides are badly placed you put huge stress to blank and even risk the blank to brake.
The rubber "grips" in the pictures are quit handy when moving the guides in different positions. They are easy to make yourself, just some rubber band in a suitable size and and something preventing them from slipping.
I'll start by placing the stripper guide where I like it and used to when casting. That's around 79-82 cm(31-32 Inch) from the butt of the blank and the rest of guides I place about equal distance along the blank to the the tip top. This time I used 12 guides in total to start with.
The aim of a static test are to get the fly line to follow the bend of the blank in a natural way.
So you have to find something that can hold the blank in a position that enables you to put load to it. I have modified an old rod holder. Then I place wight in the top of the blank. That's done by gluing the tip top in a earlier stage and now tying a PET bottle with some water to it. How heavy should the load be? Well, the pressure a fly rod have to handle varies trough the cast, it acts like a catapult so to speak. The only constant load are when you have a fish on the other side of the line. So I'll go for something in the middle and put on a decent amount of pressure but not near fully loading the blank.
After mounting a fly reel and sliding the fly line trough the guides I start moving guides from the tip top down the blank to find a nice curve of the fly line that follows the bend of the blank. And with 12 guides in total its easy to find that curve so I remove one of the running guides and start all over. The curve with 11 guides are still great. So I remove another guide and do the work ones more. With 10 guides the curve is still good but with 9 of them there's a couple of spots creating angels a bit far from the bend of the blank, no matter how I'm trying to tweak and tune the guides. So I'll go for a the lightest and an acceptable set up and use 10 guides in total.
In the picture above I'll mounted a sage Z-axis 690 rod just to show the bend of it and the placement of the guides. The curve of the fly line could be better though it will work. And if compared to the bend of the sage, the blank from Dan Craft shown in earlier in this post differs quit a bit. Loaded with same wight the sage Z-axis have a rather deep bend. The FXLT from DC reveal a really powerful casting tool. In the same time I think it will really challenge the technic of one casting it.
Talking about casting, the time has come to take my two rods out for the first ride. So I wrap some masking tape to protect the blanks and to temporarily attach the guides to them using the static test scheme .
The CTS affinity X turned out great. Fast, really smooth and with controlled action. Unfortunately I couldn't somehow get the hang of the Dan Craft rod. It felt kind of raw and just not comfortable in my hand when casting. So I reshaped the handle a bit for a more ergonomic feel and tweaked the setup of the guides. And after some time testing things it felt better. Altho somewhat cranky to handle the rod kicks like crazy when you treat it right. But I think I'll have to work some to get along with this one.
Now all that's left for this rod build are to prepare the guides, wrap and finish them. I leave that for another post.
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