spoonplugger1

You could glue it back on than cut a tenon on the end and install a butt cap to smooth and hide things.

Length makes fish feel bigger, get to light and the big bend in the rod make your hand feel like you are holding a shorter rod as the tip gets closer to your hand when bent. To stiff and you lose the versatility of lure selection and lure weight. There is no concrete answer, everything has a few compromises, set your priorities and work down the list the best you can, a good custom builder has used alot of stuff and knows where your gem may be hidden.

Look at the St Croix 5S, or 5CMXF in your length. Very light tip, better butt than a ML and you get the fancy graphite and resins. Tackletour and others have reviewed them, the blanks don't care how you build yhem so use the slightly more powerful cast blank if you want.

Those magic resins and materials have ben around for over a decade and lots of blank companies use them. G Loomis NRX material is 12+ years old, same resins came out in Lamiglas Si blanks and St. Croix SCV at the same time. Nothing new and modern that any blank manufacturer couldn't get if they wanted it. The original 3M resin was signed over exclusivey to Pure Fishing a long time ago, but I haven't noticed much usage and there were similar resins out there that the others went to. Everything out there in use is an industrial material used in industry and aviation, we use very little of the total production of materials so no one could afford the R&D and production costs of a one off graphite. The industry is very good at blowing smoke rings up people's posteriors.

Good there appears to be some tapered stuff that I didn't see before.

Composite handles took literally 15 seconds.

Edge used to sell the black widow grip, it's hand laid at the shop out of the same material they make the blanks out of, it was like 3 times the price of the commercial stuff. Have you looked at the 12 k tube at Thrasher? They have a variety of patterns.

Deltas are raw blanks, that is not scrim, it is the natural condition all blanks look like when they come out of the oven. The epoxy prepeg, (goo that holds the graphite fibers together) oozes out of the blank and through the cellophane ribbon that is wound over the blank to keep the material on the mandrel as it hangs vertically in the oven. You're seeing a mirror image of the overlapping ribbon.

As I think ghoti was alluding to, you cut a bit off, the rod slows because blank speed is simply a tip flex to rod length ratio, it has nothing to do with power. When you look at illustrations you are looking at the blank's bend ratio to total length. Length changes leverage ratios, which changes our perception of what is really happening, a equal amount of load will activate the same amount of blank fibers. The load the fish feels, not what we feel. The butt's power is derived from butt diameter and blank wall thickness. Diameter produces power far faster than wall thickness does, decrease both and things can decrease far faster than our linear way of thinking would lead us to believe. We think things are one for one, but there are actually one for 3.1417 when working with a circle.

Cutting a blank, no matter where, will slow the blank action. Cutting the butt loses power and upper lure weight carrying ability. Cutting the tip loses lower lure weight casting ability, and doesn't improve power.

The info about blank types is readily available and all the rodbuilders know them. Look at the other more relevant rod building sites where there are libraries, FAQs and glossaries. They usually end in .org.

The rods I've been around have had 9 guides to as many as 13. The JDM rods, like for instance Megabass, have the least guides. The blank will tell you how many it needs.

You don't need to order twice, NFC soft touch grips need no winding checks, or trim rings. Rubber winding checks don't need to be the exact size.

No blank series from a known quality company could survive for as many years like this line has if it wasn't a good product.

There are other sites that have first hand knowledge of these blanks from a larger group of builders. Enough knowledge to find a well reviewed blank for all techniques. Don Morse from American Tackle is there often.

Sometimes I wonder about these questions being a valid look for knowledge, just googling "Bushido blanks" would has given more info then we could ever post here.

Bushido is the name given to a line of American Tackle blanks. Before that Seeker had a line, it's been a while so I'd go with AmTack for the supplier. Been around some years now. I've liked what I have used.

The tip top is the last guide right? It doesn't have to be on the tip of the blank, it can be anywhere you like just put a running guide where you want the tip top to be on a cut blank. Same with cutting the butt, you don't have to cut it to get an Idea of what will happen, you just need to have the reel seat in the position it will be in if you did cut it. Don't make things harder than it need be, keep it simple.

Wouldn't a Google search have given you some places to start? Off the top of my head a name that have been in the rodbuilding world all that time and has a history of helping smaller starts. RebRods, sometimes better known as dorbeR, no I didn't spell it wrong.

I haven't used that blank, but I have used many SB blanks over the years, some designed by Gary. They are more powerful and faster tipped than the SJ blanks we are more used to, kind of like a light line MB blank. It should make a very nice line line casting rod, we were using them for that in the late 80's and 90's. SJ blanks also make nice light line blanks with the versatility to tie on treble hook lures also without pulling hooks.

Have you read all "The One" rod articles over at Tackletour? Might give you some ideas on which way to go, there must be near 20 articles.

If straightness was so important wouldn't our guides be considerably smaller on our rods to control a straight flow better? What we use now is like shooting a .22 bullet out of a 12 gage shotgun. When I fish from a kayak, canoe, whatever where my movements are restricted in some way, having a stable, in any position, while fighting, netting, or landing a fish rod is an asset. Cabela's used to make a rod, they may still that they advertised as near unbreakable, if you looked at the picture of the loaded rod the guides toward the tip were at near 90 degrees, I call that torguing, all on top guides rods do it to some extent, the line always naturally wants to go the the bottom of the rod, only the guides keep it on top. Spiral wrapped rods have been around for 100 years, this is nothing new.

I frankly don't see any big difference in the photos from any other system as far as load to the side, doesn't it look like the 40+ year old O'Quinn spiral wrap? Every style I have built over the years all do the same thing lock the rod in the vertical position under load, to the point that if you cradle the rod in your hands with the reel naturally flopped to the bottom and load the rod, the reel and rod on it's own will roll up into the upright position. How much load? My salmon rods with their heavier round reels will roll up on their own under 5 oz. of load. Visually, at least, it appears that no guide is loaded by the line until it is quite a way up the rod, if this is an advantage than why aren't all rods built that way? The first guide on an on top guide rod isn't set by a straight path now, no matter how low or small your reel is. So why is it there if not to take blank load? Lastly I want to ask just how much friction is generated by the line to guide contact, I bet you would have a hard time measuring it, while casting it would be even smaller, to the point of non-existence, if it was measurable you would think it would have been by now wouldn't you?

Sticking it in a crack in the dock, or between rocks can do the same thing.

Last one I saw like that was setting halfway out of the rod holder, bait dangling in the water when a big one hit it. They had barely enough grip on the fore grip when it blew up, fish was boated on their new pistol grip rod after he backed off the drag a lot.