spoonplugger1

There are a few misconceptions here about your rods as built. First a rod is a structure when built and seperating the parts and comparing them individually is a waste of time. Anyone that compares a rod without also including the reel and line used in the equation is also wasting your time. Again, it is now a singular structure that has attributes or warts depending on what you're using. Whether the weight in your hand comes from the rod or the reel, it's still weight. How it's located can be relevant, but the addition of weight in any form has a negative effect, and can reduce or remove any advantages from the rods design. In the dynamics of rod building there isn't many things that are as useful as cork, it's lightweight and structural integrity is hard to match with any other material, and it's structure in relation to our blank's modulus makes it an amplifier. Many people will try to show you the sensitivity of their product by holding it to their throat or some such nonsense so you can feel transmission of vibrations to your hand. You can do the same thing with a few tin cans and a length of string, I wouldn't fish with it. The input and vibrations you should worry about are hundreds of times lower on the frequency scale. Take your rod and look at the tip oscillations after you flick your wrist, that frequency is in the tens of times a second and is where all to sensitivity and structural attributes of your rod come into play. When that spinnerbait your slow rolling thumps how high up the frequency scale is it operating, what's the frequency of your crankbait wiggle? How high when you jig or worm drifts into that limb? How high when the bass sips your worm into his mouth, or you feel an absence of weight where there should be some? There are a few rodbuilding publications, out there that can explain all these things and rodbuilding.org is a huge resource for finding out what's in the pipe. All the rod manufacturers you could name all subscribe to these publications as this is where the innovation lies. They are in truth about 10 years behind the times, usually when something is published even in these publications the author is 2 years or so past in innovation. I'm sure many of you have heard about or seen casting rods that have guides starting in the top conventional position and they rotate to the bottom like a spinning rod fairly quickly. New innovation? No, the first published attributes of this design is from what I've seen 1909. Split grips, skeletonized reelseats, abreviated foregrip or lack of, look at some of the old Series One Berkleys and the weighted butt Mitchells from the mid to late 80's, and it wasn't new then. Metal reels were the norm, than the nylon/graphite composite reels were supposedly better. Now they say the metal reels are better, give them a few years and a good ad campaign and we'll be buying composite reels again. All this is to get you to pick one product on the rack or display case from all the others. Think the stuff on the rack is still on the leading edge of design, look at the revolver rods from Rich Forhan ( You've probably never heard of him.)in CA, the biggest innovator in bass rods in recent history pobably, and his design ideas are around 15 years old, your just seeing them in pieces now on the factory rods. The Vibronics rods from Steve Gardner, The Swampland Tackle rods and many other builders. These rods aren't any more expensive to own that the better grade stuff on the shelf, but the difference fishing or in your hand. You won't believe it till you see it.

Get with the good people at Swampland Tackle, look at the Castaway blanks. They will set you up with everything you need including a bit of encouragement. It's a very addictive thing, building your own rods. Once you get a few rods under your belt start talking to Bill about micro guiding, split grips, and other modifications to your builds. After a few builds your rods can exceed anything the factories put out easily.