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My brother, frail from recent hip replacement, is having trouble with fly rods, so I wanted to make him a spinner he could plink with. I wanted it hassle free (no ferrule) and very sturdy should he stumble or get caught in willows and have to horse it some. I had an extra #6 spinning tip top on hand (and thought, hmm, .090 at the tip is stout) and some stuff for the seat and grips @ ~ .300. I got to looking over tapers and thought, "Well, shoot. It's a spinning rod why get esoteric about it? Wonder what a completely straight line taper would do?" I made a simple graph and put dimensions from .310 to .090 on one axis, and stations from 0 to 50" on the other axis, assigning .310 to station 0 and .090 to station 50" (the strips were 50 in. and I put a sawed off piece of graphite rod under the seat and grips to make it a 5' rod. It was a lot of fun sawing up a graphite rod. ;^) I drew a sloped line from the 0/.310 mark to the 50/.090 mark and then plotted what the resulting dimensions would be at the other stations. (The results were, roughly, 310, 277, 257, 235, 215, 195, 174, 152, 132, 111 and 90 respectively.) You may note that if it had a ferrule it would be a #13. The resulting rod is very stout (Common Cents rated it at over a 9 wt. were it a fly rod) yet very supple and sensitive. With Cholla grips, wrapped in University of Wyoming colors, and dubbed Dakota Sand it was a real hit - he called he 3 times the day he got it. The straight line method, given what components are at hand seems to work well. I hope this is informative. (Darrol Groth) I like straight line tapers on fly rods. I think it is a very sound design. EC Powell seemed to believe this and I have fished several Powell rods and I have always been a believer. You may have made all our live easier dealing with extended families. (Timothy Troester)
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