guide spacing with ferrules

[RodKneeTrouter]

Lo all -

When measuring guide spacing with a ferrule and spigot rod blank - should I measure from the top of the ferrule, or the top of the actual blank on butt sections? I have measured from top of ferrule at this point and it seems way too short for the top whippings.

Mike

[Silver Stoat]

Most ring spacing charts measure from the tip (tip top) with the rod assembled.
You don't have to measure each section individually when using these charts.
If one of the spacings looks wrong then shift the ring to a position where it appears to give a nice curve to the loaded line and rod ( but load the rod independently to the line).
A useful (although maybe slightly OTT) method for setting ring positions is the so called 'Static stress distribution test'. You can find details of this at :
www.rodbuilding.org/list.php?2


Dave.

[RodKneeTrouter]

Unfortunately, this has spacings for each section.

Mike

[Silver Stoat]

Mike,

Then I would just put it where you think it should be to distribute the load as evenly as possible.

How many sections and which section is it you are talking about ?
If it's near the butt it's not going to make a huge difference.

Dave.

[RodKneeTrouter]

Thanks for the advice dave - its a scott g series 4 piece 9 ft for a 5 wt.

Apparently these guide spacings are weird anyways because Scott use 11 guides instead of 10. I have decided to measure from the actual blank rather than top of ferrule because the numbers come out in even progression of about .5" increase that way - whereas there is a much larger gap between the bottom wrap 'on ferrule' and the others if I measure from top of ferrule. Besides, the tip section has no ferrule, so that must be what they intended.

Thankfully I had not coated these whippings yet!

Mike

[Silver Stoat]

Mike,

If it looks good then it probably is.

Eleven rings on a 9' seems a tad excessive but if that's what they recommend then .............

When I have built four piece rods I assembled the the rod (after taping the ferrules with masking tape), placed the rings roughly where I thought they should be and then loaded the rod (put a curve in it) by attaching a line to the tip ring and fixing this to a static point. When the fly line is threaded through the (taped on) rings and tensioned slightly you can see if any are wildly out as the line will stand off the blank more or less at those rings. The trick is to get the fly line to have a nice progressive curve that more or less follows the curve of the rod.
Small errors here and there, especially at the butt end, are not going to make a big difference so if you need to move a ring a small amount to get it onto a ferrule to avoid having two separate whippings, then that should not be a problem.
This seems to give reasonable results.
Mostly the manufacturers recommended spacings at the tip end are pretty close, and that's the most important area IMO.

Dave.

[RodKneeTrouter]

Thanks dave!

I've tried that and it looks ok - we'll see how she goes. It makes a nice curve. Its a very 'whippy' rod - almost like my old orvis hampshire - so I think that the extra guide might be a necessity on this one - I suppose I shall sacrifce some distance with the extra guide - but this rod was never going to chuck a chicken anyway.

Its getting a baptism by fire shall we say in a few weeks as I'm taking it on my annual spring fishing trip to the US. I expect she'll probably get 'fished' out on the drive first though.

Mike