I'm building a 13-foot Breakaway for 1-3 oz. lures as a post-holidays project. I have been trying to find out what would be the best guides and their sizes and spacing to maximize casting performance (translated, "distance!"). My past rod projects have all been built using huge Perfection SS guides--and their distances have been tremendous.
Fuji's Website explains their "New Guide Concept." It boils down to smaller guides (their SICs), and more of them (as many as nine guides on a 7 foot spinning rod, for example.) The assumption is that big stainless steel 75, 60, 50, 40 mm, etc. Perfections are too heavy and too non-smooth, and thus lead to shorter casting distance due to wrong weight load on rod and too much line friction, to be as efficient as the newer SIC guides, especially with titanium frames. Even the Hardloys are supposed to be superior to the Perfection SSs.
Fuji explains location of the "choke guide" in their diagrams on their website. I've run the numbers on this idea for a Sustain 4000FB (my new, recently ordered 6000FB has not yet arrived). The conclusion is that the choke guide should be located 41 inches from the reel (it'll be longer for the 6000, but I don't know how much longer yet because I don't know how far the spool is from the rod on a 6000). That's about 3.5 feet. The choke guide, according to Fuji, should be the smallest-ringed guide on the rod. In other words, the larger guides should be between the choke guide and the reel, and a few more that are the same size as the choke guide should be between it and the tip guide.
This would be a weird looking rod! But appearances notwithstanding, Fuji claims it shoud be a superior caster because it follows their new guide concept. It would cost me somewhere around $200 just to buy the guides to do this!
I'd like to ask S-T members who build rods to check out Fuji's system (
www.fujitackle.com), and venture an opinion either on S-T or to me by email, as to whether you think it's bogus or not-bogus.
I think it's a flawed system. I have an opinion on how it's flawed, and one on why it was published. But I don't want to get nasty about it.
Ultimately, I still have more faith in a set of huge Perfection SS guides than in three times as many much smaller Fujis on a spinning rig. Also, I don't want to tie up a $140 blank with $200-worth of fancy guides, only to find out the theory is wrong!
'Sorry this is so long.
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