What makes a blank a really good blank??

[finga]

I'm curious on what you think makes a blank a really good blank.
There you go...open slather.
Ta all

[Flattie Assassin]

Ohh i feel like a student answering the teacher. umm umm pick me sir.. Manufacturing process, Components and action!!

[tunaticer]

If it suits your intended uses for that rod its the right one regardless of cost or name or brand.
I have been building my rods for 30ish yrs now and some of the rods i currently use and have built will match just about anything in its class for fishability and useability.

There is way too much marketting going on promoting decent average quality rods as being the best and the must haves. I believe that we as fishos follow the pack just like teenage girls these days following trends or must having the right gear for the right look etc.

Open slather enough?

Jack.

[DR]

If it suits your intended uses for that rod its the right one regardless of cost or name or brand.
I have been building my rods for 30ish yrs now and some of the rods i currently use and have built will match just about anything in its class for fishability and useability.

There is way too much marketting going on promoting decent average quality rods as being the best and the must haves. I believe that we as fishos follow the pack just like teenage girls these days following trends or must having the right gear for the right look etc.

Open slather enough?

Jack.

totally agree with tunaticer... way too much promotion on what is supposed to be the best. If given 3 unbranded rods, one top of the range, one mid & a lower end I feel that most wouldn't really pick a lot of difference between them, certainly not the 100s of dollars between top & bottom.
to each his own, a lot still swear by Ugly Stiks & wouldn't own anything else, if it does everything you need & you are happy with it, it's the best one..

personally i like most blanks with a fast taper & a fast recovery..i'm easy pleased

[Stuart]

Finga

Good question and one that should be explained. I have been building rods for many years. On top of this I designed blanks for many companies overseas. I also designed my own range of blanks which I have sold for years as made up rods only. If we look at the question Finga asked “I'm curious on what you think makes a blank a really good blank” Then the answer isn’t a matter of “If the blank feels good then its fine” doesn’t quite fit. Blanks come in thousands of configurations while some of the claims are beyond comprehension. To try and keep this as simple as possible I won’t go down the high tech road but rather keep it simple so every one can under stand. To begin with there is no shortage of cheap crap blanks but in having said that there are also many good blanks on the market. I may even think a blank is crap when you think its great, why you ask? Well…. Based on my experience I’m looking at different things in the blank were as you might be looking at action and the finish. I’m not for a second belittling anyone here; it’s a matter of experience and understanding of blanks. Don’t ask me to mention blank names or model numbers on this site because I won’t.

The difference in a good blank and a bad blank is three fold, 1 How the blank has been rolled 2 The material which has been used 3 the placement of that material. If one of these three are missed or stuffed up or even misunderstood then your blank wont be all it could have been. Lets look at number one, how the blank has been rolled. There are many resones why a blank can go wrong here and the biggest cause is lack of persistent pressure on the rolling table. This will lead to misalignment of the fibre which will cause either a soft blank or even worse a failure. If the material isn’t wrapped tight around the mandrel then when it comes time to wrap the cellophane around the blank it will pull the material in all directions. 2 The material which has been used. This is what makes or brakes a blank and quite literary. This is were it gets quite technical, each type and grade of material has a stretch ratio over its length. This is were material placement comes in to equation i.e. Carbon and glass must be placed in the right location of the blank in terms of its wall or the different materials will fight against one another.

This leads to premature softening “inter layer delamination”, Outer wall delamination or just a snapped rod. Lets say carbon has a stretch ratio of 2.1% over its length and glass has a ratio of 3.2% over its length then tell my why would we put the carbon over the top of the glass as so many do? Ooo.. I know that answer, it’s cheaper and much faster to produce. That’s why you see so many blanks rolled this way, carbon in the butt and glass in the tip section. 3 The placement of the material, this ties into number 2 in many ways. Because material has many different ratios you need to work out exactly were to place them so they all work together at the right time of the bending moment. You don’t need to be exact but you do need to be dam close. This can take many days to work out were the material needs to be placed in order to achieve the action and power required. I can tell you all there is way more to it than what I have just penned but as I stated in the beginning I will keep it simple.

Yes, sure you can go and flex a few rod blanks, look at the paint and say…. yep that’s got some balls. Most of the rod building fraternity has had the wool pulled over your eyes for so long it’s not funny. I have tried in vain to clean a few areas up but only to be threatened with legal action, what does that tell you.

Stu
Precision Rods

[finga]

Ohh i feel like a student answering the teacher. umm umm pick me sir.. Manufacturing process, Components and action!!

Mate, I've learnt a lot from the young members here.
Never too old to learn and never too young to teach.

[finga]

From my very limited experience with this rodbuilding caper I've learnt a lot. And it's probably not what the marketeers would like.
I've seen el cheapo blanks do a lot more then what could be expected of them and seen relatively expensive blanks bring disappointment.
I've also seen blanks that wouldn't be any good even as a tomato stake but that was expected of them and this was the reason I started the thread.
So from what I can gather it's a matter of getting background knowledge of the product you intend to use whether it be blanks, guides, thread, epoxy etc etc

One particular blank I've built was made in China and was given to me so I made it up purely for the experience as I wanted to also experiment with a spiral wrap.
Now as soon as you load this thing and leave the load on it for more then 10 minutes it gets a memory and takes about a day to become relatively straight again.
The action is good and would suit me but it's a crappy blank..... but I'm not complaining. I know it was crap from the word go and had no expectations of it other then been black.
It was a whole $3 for a 8-10kg blank. It'll never get used to catch a fish (it'll probably get hung on the wall to hang fish capture pictures off...the rod of fame..or the rod of shame) but was worth it just for the project intended ie getting some building skills

It also seems to me that you really don't know what a blank is like until you build it and try it in it's intended use. If it's a success then your laughing. If not then try again.

So is there any way we can tell how a blank is made by looking at it??
Or is it a matter of asking questions and trying to find specifics first.

PS Stuart...could you do a cut and paste of your post and start a new thread like your "how a spine is formed" thread.
A mod might make it sticky as it's great info

[Stuart]

Finga

"So is there any way we can tell how a blank is made by looking at it??
Or is it a matter of asking questions and trying to find specifics first."



There are a few tips you can look at. If your looking at a composite blank and the carbon is visibly on the outside then I would avoid it. If the wall thickness seems quite thin for what it is then again avoid it. Many imported blanks spruik about the carbon in the blank like Im6, IM7, T700, and T800 and so on. This grade of carbon is in fact only a standard modules. For those that still don’t follow, it’s the cheapest carbon you can buy and some of the softest around in terms of elasticity.

Stu

[Bruce_Bogtrotter]

Finga

"So is there any way we can tell how a blank is made by looking at it??
Or is it a matter of asking questions and trying to find specifics first."



There are a few tips you can look at. If your looking at a composite blank and the carbon is visibly on the outside then I would avoid it. If the wall thickness seems quite thin for what it is then again avoid it. Many imported blanks spruik about the carbon in the blank like Im6, IM7, T700, and T800 and so on. This grade of carbon is in fact only a standard modules. For those that still don’t follow, it’s the cheapest carbon you can buy and some of the softest around in terms of elasticity.

Stu

thanks Stuart, what is the better of the graphites? & are they judged on how many 'million' modulus they are? & what modulus does the good stuff start at??

[Stuart]

Carbon fibre has a classification rating which is tensile modulus. Tensile Modulus simply means how much pulling force a specific diameter fibre can withstand without breaking. This is measured in PSI “ pounds per squere inch”. Low Modulus has a tensile modulus under 34.8 million psi while the other standards such as standard modulus, intermediate modulus, high modulus and ultra high modulus. Ultra high modulus has tensile of any were from around 70 through 150 million psi. From memory, steel has a tensile strenght of less than 30 million psi. The other term you may have heard of is ‘Modulus of Elasticity’. This is a measure of stress of the fibre over strain.

I know most of you use the term graphite, this term is wrong although most of there industry use’s it because they don’t know. Graphite is derived from pitch based product “oil”. Graphite is in fact a pure form of carbon while carbon is the second from the top of the tree.

Stu

[craftycarp]

I have heard that bonding agent is as important as the carbon fibre used. Apparently the better the bonding agent the less carbon fibre is needed to achieve similar strength? Or have I got this wrong?

[Stuart]

The bonding agent is very important, as is important as the carbon because one with out the other and you wont have a blank. The resin used by some is called Polyester while the better blanks use epoxy resins. Polyester resin is cheap and nasty because it sets brittle, can and will form a memory in the blank like Fingers blank did, is way more likely to breakage than that of epoxy resin. The bonding agent as you call it is in fact called the matrix; it’s what keeps every fibre in alignment. Can we loose some carbon because of the resin used? No way. Most cloths today wouldn’t hold any more resin than 15% per square meter, some are even less than that. Once the cellophane is wrapped onto the blank and then backed at 120 degrees for 3 hours most of the resin is squeezed out under pressure. How much resin is hard to say butt a guess of around 50 to 60% of its total volume would be close I think. You need very little epoxy resin to keep the blank together and epoxy resin is some of the world’s strongest adhesives.

Stu
l

[Owen]

There are a few tips you can look at. If your looking at a composite blank and the carbon is visibly on the outside then I would avoid it. Stu

Stu,
Are you refering to instances where there are stray fibres sticking out sucha s in some of the "OEM" blanks, or the types that have raised helically wound fibres such as sold by some well known manufacturers?

I have some of both. The former are as good as what I paid for I suppose and the latter seems to perform well enough. Trouble for most of us punters is that we don't have the opportunity to test side by side under controlled conditions.

The first time I used the rod I refer to as the later I didn't feel like I was in control of the fish, however I was on a boat that was covered in, so I couldn't work the 7' blank properly.
Had I lost the fish of a lifetime I'd probably have felt that blank was a piece of crap, whether it deserved it or not.

Most of what is considered "the good stuff" is based on the opinions of a few blokes who write for magazines etc and most of these have VERY questionable objectivity.
The same can be said of some forums.

I don't believe there is a system in place that allows the average woody to evaluate the relative performance of two different blanks for use in same fishing conditions. Nor do I think you will ever get industry support for such a system.

So in the end, a "good blank" is one that achieves the purpose within the constraints of your budget.
I wonder how many monster murray cod have been landed on a bamboo pole?

[DR]

Stu,
Most of what is considered "the good stuff" is based on the opinions of a few blokes who write for magazines etc and most of these have VERY questionable objectivity.
The same can be said of some forums.

& repeated verbatim by the sheeple..

[Stuart]

Meaning?

Stu