Here's some thinking I'd like to share with you on tenkara rod design.
I'm no engineer, and while lengthy discussion of rod mechanics leaves me cold, a recent test casting of a new tenkara rod inspired me to carry out some back yard experiments of my own - the results of which are (to me at least) quite illuminating.
Reading around the usual places there is much excellent advice on individual tenkara rod characteristics - flex profiles, recovery, rotational movement, weight, length etc etc - all measurable objective physical features of the rods in question.
Then there are the more subjective opinions offered on things like cosmetics, haptic feedback, how this rod feels casting that line at this length, catching this or that size or kind of fish in this kind of river, and so on and so on. These kinds of reports I'm naturally more inclined to, if only because I find them more interesting and entertaining than a bunch of cold hard measured facts.
Then there are the more subjective opinions offered on things like cosmetics, haptic feedback, how this rod feels casting that line at this length, catching this or that size or kind of fish in this kind of river, and so on and so on. These kinds of reports I'm naturally more inclined to, if only because I find them more interesting and entertaining than a bunch of cold hard measured facts.
But facts don't lie, while opinions are entirely subjective - and though often offered honestly and in the spirit of helpfulness - they can at times badly mislead. Or in other words, you can't really tell from the reviews and reports of others if you will really enjoy a rod until you get your hands on the real item and get out there onto the water with it to fish.
And so it is with the Daiwa Expert H44. I wasn't in the market for one, but as chance would have it a friend had purchased one on impulse a few months back and had never gotten around to fishing with it. And it just so happened that I had a euro nymph rod and reel looking for a new home so we agreed to do a straight swap.
The H44 is lauded by many as the finest big fish tenkara rod currently available. So, standing in the margins of a tributary of the majestic River Thames I began to extend the rod for the first time with high exectations... and discovered the H44 to be an absolute pig. (Now I know many anglers love this rod and the problem is probably all mine, but then again this is my blog so I can say what I like.)
To me on first impression, the rod seemed overly nose heavy, the handle too short and very quickly my wrist began to ache casting and holding the rod in the classic line-off-the-water tenkara position. Instinctively moving my grip position further forward, to be closer to the rods balance point, helped a little but robbed me of some of the advantage of extra length this 440cm rod has over a lighter 400cm rod. And even then it still felt much too nose heavy. In fact it only began to feel balanced in the hand with the rod lowered much closer to parallel with the water. 'This isn't a tenkara rod at all' a little voice chimed in my head, and then I remembered some sales blurb I had read somewhere that the H44 is designed for use with Daiwa's floating tenkara lines.
Could it be that Daiwa's rod designers don't expect H44 owners to be holding much line off of the water, and hence expect them often to be using a low rod position? Maybe, and if so perhaps I'm missing the point with this rod, but for me, currently, this isn't a style of fishing that appeals. If I want to cast long floating lines I have beautiful Sage fly rod that can do that for me. I'll leave you to decide whether this is even tenkara at all - just let me exit the room before that particular hand grenade detonates..
But back to the point of the post, which is that for me at least, good rod balance is the bedrock of all tenkara rod goodness. Good rod balance will promote good grip, good dampening and good casting technique. It will allow you to sharpen your reflexes, fish effectively, manipulate with subtlety and without fatigue. Bad rod balance will destroy all of these things. Revisiting briefly my first impression of the H44, the poor, nose-heavy balance of the rod when used for classic mainstream tenkara was for me so off putting that I never persisted long enough with the H44 to discover its other qualities.
All of this got me to thinking about tenkara rod balance point and how this could be expressed to give a prospective user some kind of comparative value between different rods.
So I did some measuring of six different rods in my quiver. I measured rod length (RL). I measured balance point (let's call this BP) which is the point at which the rod balances level, while resting on a stationary single point of support (like say your index finger). I used a bait fisher's 'rod rest' as the support. Then I measured handle length (HL).
Clearly a 'well balanced' rod will have its BP not too far up the rod blank from the front of the handle, ie not too far in front of your hand if you are holding the rod with your index finger extended along the rod blank. I wanted to find a relationship between RL, BP and HL that would indicate a nicely balanced rod in the hand, beyond which a rod would start to feel cumbersome and poorly balanced like the H44 does (to me at least). So my thinking is as follows:
Deduct the value of the handle length in cm from the value of the balance point in cm. The result is of course the amount in cm that the balance point is in front of the handle. Let's call this amount for want of a better term 'overhang' (O). Clearly a bigger 'overhang' means a more nose heavy rod, but this of course relates also to rod length because a large overhang on a shorter rod is less of an issue than it will be on a longer rod because you are holding up less weight beyond the balance point. But either way don't forget that no matter what the rod is made of or how heavy it is or how that weight is distributed along the rod, at the balance point 50% percent of the rod weight is one side of the BP and 50% is the other side. So the further from your hand the BP is, the heavier the rod will feel and this effect becomes magnified the longer the rod is, so my final calculation factored rod length effect in by multiplying overhang by rod length.
The result I shall call Rod Balance Factor (RBF) where RBF= (BP-HL)xRL
and BP-HL = O
Now here's the good stuff. I applied these measures and calculations to a variety of rods as shown below. In this quiver I've always thought that my Karasu 360 and bamboo Wazoa rod have the nicest balance in hand, followed closely by the Dawai LL SF 3.6, and this is really borne out by the results. And just take a look at where the Dawai H44 scores.
Lower numbers are better : in summary and in my humble opinion, a RBF value in the range of 1 to 1.25 indicates a sweetly balanced rod. Around 1.9 is going to feel comfortable enough, but get up to the high two's and things start to turn nasty.
But it doesn't necessarily need to be this way. If you play around with the numbers in my table you'll see that If the balance point of the H44 could be moved as near to the handle as the better balancing rods in this test then H44's balance in hand would be as comfortable as the shorter rods. This could be achieved by adding quite a small amount of weight to the lower handle (equal to the weight of the short section of blank making up the 'overhang') This surely isn't beyond the wit of rod designers! H44 feels like a lazy bit of design to me.
I rest my case. Now I think I need to go and have a lay down.
And so it is with the Daiwa Expert H44. I wasn't in the market for one, but as chance would have it a friend had purchased one on impulse a few months back and had never gotten around to fishing with it. And it just so happened that I had a euro nymph rod and reel looking for a new home so we agreed to do a straight swap.
The H44 is lauded by many as the finest big fish tenkara rod currently available. So, standing in the margins of a tributary of the majestic River Thames I began to extend the rod for the first time with high exectations... and discovered the H44 to be an absolute pig. (Now I know many anglers love this rod and the problem is probably all mine, but then again this is my blog so I can say what I like.)
To me on first impression, the rod seemed overly nose heavy, the handle too short and very quickly my wrist began to ache casting and holding the rod in the classic line-off-the-water tenkara position. Instinctively moving my grip position further forward, to be closer to the rods balance point, helped a little but robbed me of some of the advantage of extra length this 440cm rod has over a lighter 400cm rod. And even then it still felt much too nose heavy. In fact it only began to feel balanced in the hand with the rod lowered much closer to parallel with the water. 'This isn't a tenkara rod at all' a little voice chimed in my head, and then I remembered some sales blurb I had read somewhere that the H44 is designed for use with Daiwa's floating tenkara lines.
Could it be that Daiwa's rod designers don't expect H44 owners to be holding much line off of the water, and hence expect them often to be using a low rod position? Maybe, and if so perhaps I'm missing the point with this rod, but for me, currently, this isn't a style of fishing that appeals. If I want to cast long floating lines I have beautiful Sage fly rod that can do that for me. I'll leave you to decide whether this is even tenkara at all - just let me exit the room before that particular hand grenade detonates..
But back to the point of the post, which is that for me at least, good rod balance is the bedrock of all tenkara rod goodness. Good rod balance will promote good grip, good dampening and good casting technique. It will allow you to sharpen your reflexes, fish effectively, manipulate with subtlety and without fatigue. Bad rod balance will destroy all of these things. Revisiting briefly my first impression of the H44, the poor, nose-heavy balance of the rod when used for classic mainstream tenkara was for me so off putting that I never persisted long enough with the H44 to discover its other qualities.
All of this got me to thinking about tenkara rod balance point and how this could be expressed to give a prospective user some kind of comparative value between different rods.
So I did some measuring of six different rods in my quiver. I measured rod length (RL). I measured balance point (let's call this BP) which is the point at which the rod balances level, while resting on a stationary single point of support (like say your index finger). I used a bait fisher's 'rod rest' as the support. Then I measured handle length (HL).
Clearly a 'well balanced' rod will have its BP not too far up the rod blank from the front of the handle, ie not too far in front of your hand if you are holding the rod with your index finger extended along the rod blank. I wanted to find a relationship between RL, BP and HL that would indicate a nicely balanced rod in the hand, beyond which a rod would start to feel cumbersome and poorly balanced like the H44 does (to me at least). So my thinking is as follows:
Deduct the value of the handle length in cm from the value of the balance point in cm. The result is of course the amount in cm that the balance point is in front of the handle. Let's call this amount for want of a better term 'overhang' (O). Clearly a bigger 'overhang' means a more nose heavy rod, but this of course relates also to rod length because a large overhang on a shorter rod is less of an issue than it will be on a longer rod because you are holding up less weight beyond the balance point. But either way don't forget that no matter what the rod is made of or how heavy it is or how that weight is distributed along the rod, at the balance point 50% percent of the rod weight is one side of the BP and 50% is the other side. So the further from your hand the BP is, the heavier the rod will feel and this effect becomes magnified the longer the rod is, so my final calculation factored rod length effect in by multiplying overhang by rod length.
The result I shall call Rod Balance Factor (RBF) where RBF= (BP-HL)xRL
and BP-HL = O
Now here's the good stuff. I applied these measures and calculations to a variety of rods as shown below. In this quiver I've always thought that my Karasu 360 and bamboo Wazoa rod have the nicest balance in hand, followed closely by the Dawai LL SF 3.6, and this is really borne out by the results. And just take a look at where the Dawai H44 scores.
Lower numbers are better : in summary and in my humble opinion, a RBF value in the range of 1 to 1.25 indicates a sweetly balanced rod. Around 1.9 is going to feel comfortable enough, but get up to the high two's and things start to turn nasty.
But it doesn't necessarily need to be this way. If you play around with the numbers in my table you'll see that If the balance point of the H44 could be moved as near to the handle as the better balancing rods in this test then H44's balance in hand would be as comfortable as the shorter rods. This could be achieved by adding quite a small amount of weight to the lower handle (equal to the weight of the short section of blank making up the 'overhang') This surely isn't beyond the wit of rod designers! H44 feels like a lazy bit of design to me.
I rest my case. Now I think I need to go and have a lay down.
I totally agree, I have 2 Nissin rods that are very well balanced, I have a zero sun 360 that I can cast all day and feels weightless. I also have a 330 airstage with a wood handle that is also very well balanced. I was looking for a spare rod with a little more reach so I picked up a Daiwa sagri 45 MC which is a seiryu rod with a zoom from 390 to 450. It fishes ok at 390, not nearly as nice as my Nissin but I didn't expect it to, however at 450 it is very nose heavy and wears my arm out quickly. I'm going to add some heavy bicycle grip tape to the handle, it is currently bare carbon, and see if that helps. I'll let you know the results.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing this and keep in touch with those findings!
DeleteAssuming that balance point is more important than overall weight when it comes to the "comfort" of a rod, you could theoretically adjust the balance point of any rod by replacing the grip screw cap with a heavier one (or lighter, I suppose). Perhaps there is a machinist out there that would be willing to make you a few caps of differing weights so you could continue this research. I can even imagine a weighted cap with longer threads so you could adjust the balance point for personal preference or even to adjust for different lengths of a zoom rod. Just screw it in or out a bit. Interesting case study. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteYes that's an interesting thought and thanks for the feedback!
Delete