How Many Guides Are To Many?

[LSU Fan]

1. Hope I can get some kind of response.  I received a Liberty MB794 7'9" blank at the International Custom Rod Builders Expo in Winston-Salem, NC last weekend.  Spent Yesterday and today building this Jig pitchin' rod for the upcoming season.  Thing is I was told put 11 guides or more on that rod starting with the stripper guide at 13" from the reel.  Finished the rod today.  Haven't tried it and don't really know what to expect.  Ended up with 16 guides not counting the tip top.  Reason I put 16 guides on rod was when rod loaded up it took that many guides spaced to keep line from contacting rod when rod is bent with load.  Any opinion of number of guides? 

[S Hovanec]

16 sounds excessive.  Doesn't really matter if the line touches but If you're concerned about keeping line off the blank, wrap it spiral.  Without seeing the static test, I'd wager a guess of 10-11 guides is all that is needed.

[spoonplugger1]

Agree 10, maybe 11. How long is your rear grip? 13 inches is to close to the reel, 15 to 18 is about right. Some of my rods are over 20 inches away, static distribution starts at the tip, not some guides back, first guide from the tip should be set with the same criteria as the others, means 1 less guide on most rod right there.

The line shouldn't go under the blank, we're adding guides to protect the rod blank from damage and to distribute the load over the entire blank, it's not a beauty contest. Guides used on earlier rods were bigger, heavier and taller. That suggestion was implemented back in those days when you had one guide per foot of rod and sometimes less. With the much shorter guides used today the line naturally rides much closer to the blank all the time, bent, or otherwise, but the loads put on the blank haven't changed and the guides, no matter the height have identical loads put on them and through to the blank, makes it much easier now to build a poorly balanced rod if your guides are 3 or 4 inches apart, than you add weight to the butt to compensate for your bad guide setup, soon you have a graphite rod that weighs more the a well set up glass rod.

My salmon/steelhead rods are longer by over a foot and they have less guides, my 10 1/2 ft. rods have 3 less guides than you have on your rod..

[Angry John]

This may help or interest you  http://anglersresource.net/GuidePlacementSoftware.aspx

[MickD]

I never add weight to a rod.  Build it as light as possible to do its intended job, and leave it alone.  IMHO, way too many guides on the rod (16) which will contribute to the tip-heavy condition. To minimize this, my direction would be to cut the number of guides.  I also don't believe that line touching the blank is an issue, but agree that if it crosses over, it simply looks bad, so I try to avoid it.  The suggestion to do it spiral will result in the minimum number of guides (based on stress test).  Search for "simple spiral wrap rodbuilding" on the internet. The simple spiral is easy to set up and is effective, results in no line tending to accumulate on one side of the reel like some other methods.

[spoonplugger1]

The anglers resource article won't help, it's for spinning rods. The extra guides used on rods lately has nothing to do with distributing blank load, it started about 15 years, or so when braided lines really started taking off on surf rods. As you know a surf rod is built with less guides per foot than a bass rod by a considerable amount, this led to the the limp line lassoing guides and damaging guides, throwing off expensive plugs when the line made an abrupt stop, etc.

Adding a FEW extra and sometime smaller guides helped greatly as it tamed the loops. As usual only half the info gets passed on, none of the reason for the change is included, it gets hyped up by know nothing press, and the rest goes into the mists of mythology. 

If you have an older rod with guide lassoing problems, going to a.smaller guide set cures it also. Just like like shooting a .22 lr bullet is more efficient and more accurate than shooting it out of a .30 caliber bore, the exact same reason I like micro guided rods, if 50 lb. mono passes through a 3mm guide with no problems, my braid, fluoro and mono selections are not an issue, and you'll never loop a guide again, almost never have multi rod snagging on your boat deck, and rods go in and out of under deck storage so much better.