The needles from earlier this year? Not sure which you mean but if you are referring to the ones that were available at Asbury - the dimensions are exactly the same. If you have seen pics of older needles I've made - then there is a slight difference. I tweaked the dimensions of the tail slightly because I felt that I wanted a little more "meat" in the tail for durability reasons. I do a lot of testing with this stuff and one of the tests is to see how well the plug will hold up being smacked on the rocks. By bumping the tail diameter slightly I felt a great deal more comfort. I compensated the weighting so that the sink rate is where I wanted it. Having said that - the change is only in the tail and it isn't terribly significant and it has been that way on every needle I've made this year.
As for sink rates etc - I am basically only making the slow/moderate sinker available at the moment. I actually have three different versions (floater, slow/moderate, fast). Funny think is that my biggest holdup on the other two versions is that I'm too lazy to figure out how to appropiately mark them to diferentiate
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Hope that helps
Ryan