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Reading the some other discussions made me think maybe I should build one of the Marinaro convex tapers just to see what they're like to cast (single handed trout rod, not a spey). I'm thinking of the 8.5ft 6wt. Has anyone built it? Can an average Joe enjoy casting and fishing it? I'm definitely not in the same class as the casters testing the tapers in the book. (Frank Stetzer, Hexrod, Taper Archive, Rodmakers Archive) The stress curve for this rod bears a "family resemblance" (Wittgenstein's term) to that of my favorite 5wt, the Cross Bataviakill in the archives. So I think I will like it. I've heard good things off-list about Marinaro's 8.5 ft 5wt too so I may whittle that one out also if the arthritis in my hands permits. Thanks to Jim Sobota who shared his taper and Harry and Lowell who shared it with the list and all for the discussion. (Frank Stetzer, Hexrod, Taper Archive, Rodmakers Archive) I'm thinking of the 8.5ft 6wt. Has anyone built it? Can an average Joe enjoy casting and fishing it? Hi Frank - I don’t recall the rod as being at all tricky. I do think we were casting it with a 7 weight, however. I would also suggest the 9 foot 5 weight from 1971. It’s not tricky, either, as long as you can control your wrist and make a slower stroke. It’s not a distance caster, but will be very pleasant to fish within normal casting distances, particularly on Spring Creeks. On that one, keep all components as light as possible. You could bog it down with heavy guides, ferrules, etc. (Tom Smithwick) If you can find a copy of the taper of the rod that Jim Sobota from Wisconsin has had at several gatherings it will make a believer out of you. It was perhaps the single best rod at the Colorado Rodmakers event two years ago, and is always a favorite of mine. (Harry Boyd) PS -- If you can't find it, I have the taper here and will share it if Jim grants permission. It is not my taper to share, but I will include it below. At least partly because I did not design this rod I cannot discuss its design. I have cast this rod on more than one occasion and found it completely enjoyable.
What I’ve come to find through not only trial and error but, feedback from other clients is… Everybody talks a lot about this and that in rod making, especially rodmakers but, when a rod feels right, the vast majority of people you show that rod to, will also say “Yeah you’re right, It feels “right” ”. (Ren Monllor) I have cast this rod on more than one occasion and found it completely enjoyable. Hi Harry - I liked the looks of the taper, and charted it. Jim did a very nice job of following Marinaro’s method of design, IMHO. I would expect it to be both faster and more powerful than Marinaro’s own rods, but the principles are well applied. Nice job overall. I’m not surprised it has a lot of fans. (Tom Smithwick) Could not help but notice the posts about the Convex rod taper and wondered what made it convex. Upon plotting it I was surprised to find it actually was more of a straight taper and not the slightest bit convex. I wondered why it would be so named? Now when I looked at the actual Taper I found that the rod tip except for the first station was pretty straight averaging about .014” increase per 5-inch station and that the butt except for stations 45” to 60” averaged about .014” also, then the Butt dropped of at the handle to a zero increase from 80” to 90”. To me this looks very much like a straight taper except for the slight changes at the tip and the butt. Where then do we get the name Convex? Please forgive me if I am missing something for I am truly at a loss. Also I think the rod was listed as a 5 wt but I feel it would make as good or better 6 wt, at least this is the way I look at it assuming the actual taper is what throws the line, which is not quite correct is it. (Bob Norwood) Actually going past just plotting it and fitting a parabolic curve to the taper shows that it's mildly parabolic like a Powell C taper with slope 10.4 thousandths per 6" section and increment of - 0.00048". See articles on my web site "Of Powell Tapers and Parabolics" and "What is a Parabolic Rod." Concave is a general term for a curved taper that is like a downward cupped parabola or the upper left quadrant of circle. (Mike McGuire) I just graphed the taper and, yes, it is a convex taper as described by Bill Harms and Tom Whittle in their book about Marinaro. It is not aggressively so, but, compared with a straight line joining stations 0 and 45, the taper rises a bit above that line and joins it at the ends. The same is true of the taper between stations 45 and 75, although there the rise above the straight line is very little. My own experience with convex tapers is that they are particularly effective for tips, which may be part of the reason for less “convexity” in the butt. (Tim Anderson) Where then do we get the name Convex? Please forgive me if I am missing something for I am truly at a loss. The big surprise for me when I cast the rods and saw the actual tapers was how subtle the swells and dips in Marinaro’s designs actually were, compared to what I had puzzled over in “The Ring of the Rise” for years. The tapers are actually medium slow progressives, at least most of them. I was expecting faster tapers based on the description and the illustrations in that book. Your chart should be showing a quick rise at the tip, followed by a long fairly straight run into the ferrule. The butt should show a subtler rise coming out of the ferrule, followed again by a slower, fairly straight decline into the handle. You can agree or not about how “convex” the scheme is, but that seems to be what he meant. The tip looks just a bit on the heavy side for a 5 weight to me, too, but I trust Harry to know the difference. (Tom Smithwick) The taper that I got from Jim has different numbers for stations 5, 10, 15 than the one on the list Thanks, I would have to say that your numbers for the tip are a little more understandable however the taper and the title are still questionable in my mind. (Bob Norwood) I have attended 35 or so rodmakers gatherings over the last 20+ years. There I have handled and cast dozens, maybe scores, of rods per event. In that time, I've certainly cast hundreds of rods, probably around a thousand. As you know I'm a good caster, though not as good as some. I have evaluated rods for you. So when I say a rod is a good one, and a favorite of mine, I at least speak from experience. And if I call it five weight, I'm probably pretty close. However, this rod appears not to fit your ideas of how it should perform and what it should be labeled. So I have a few questions for you:
The problem with any system of evaluating rods by computer is that the system is limited by the design parameters of the system designer. Jim's rod was not designed with your system in mind, but with Marinaro's. It seems most fair to me to evaluate it against that system rather than by yours. If we are going to require all taper discussions to use your parameters and terminology our discussions are going to be greatly limited. I have never used (or purchased) your program and don't plan to. Therefore, I can't speak to how well it works or how useful it is. Let's try hard to discuss all kinds of tapers and all kinds of taper designs and all kinds of taper design systems. Let's use Garrison/Carmichael, Hexrod (Cattanach), RodDNA, DynaRod (Satoh), Flexrod, yours, and any others I have forgotten. (Harry Boyd) FWIW, I can appreciate anyone trying to nail down a system of any kind to understand rod tapers. I think it is a particularly difficult thing to do, but someone's gotta try or you really are just throwing darts in the dark. Who knows when we will ever get to a point where we can decide upon a universal standard for rod taper nomenclature and classification. Easy for extreme examples- less do for most rods. I've cast this rod and, like Harry, find it a superb rod with a 5 weight line. No matter how you classify it, what you call it, or what one thinks it ought to be, it's currently roughed out on my bench and I have a 5 Wt line waiting for its completion. (Rick Crenshaw) It’s hard to know what you may have been expecting to see. That is, one can’t tell what the idea of “convexity” means to you, nor what expression of it you might have anticipated in a rod taper. That said, I also notice that your computerized plot seems inadequate to reveal any subtleties in a taper. For this, what’s needed is a graph that uses a large format and a more pronounced ratio between the x and y axes—a scale that truly reveals the differences in trajectory that a couple thousandth of an inch can make. (Nothing sophisticated is required, and I’ve never used anything but 11 x 17 graph paper, pencil and a straightedge to plot my tapers.) Without evaluating any particulars of Lowell Davis’ design, it’s important to notice that it is, indeed, based on Marinaro’s principles, though it is not one of Marinaro’s own tapers. This is fine, of course, because my designs are not Marinaro’s own either. But none of this is at issue. The issues you raise are whether Davis’s design “qualifies” as a convex taper, and, indeed, what “convex” means in any case. I can’t help you to understand this if you don’t wish to distinguish a convex from a straight taper, or if you have already established your own criteria. In any case, “convexity” is a relative term that says nothing about where the swell might occur, how it might be distributed, nor how pronounced it may be. In ALL cases, however, the overall trajectory of each rod section should describe a fair curve—however subtly. Actually, there’s no need to argue the case of Davis’ design at all. Even without plotting, the numbers of his taper, by themselves, show the rod’s convexity (except for its oddities at stations 30 and 65). Beginning at the tip, as the numbers move from station to station, you’ll notice that the dimensions increase, by .019”, .019”, .016”, .016”, .014” and so forth, finally following a more-or-less straight path to the ferrule at 42”. When adequately plotted, this line describes a convex trajectory (again, notwithstanding station 30). Similarly, once past the ferrule itself, we see the stations in the butt section growing first by .018”, and then rounding-down with .014” increases as we get to the grip. Except for station 65, this line would plot a roughly convex curve. I can’t account for stations 30 and 65, but the “dips” there seem to be something Lowell wanted. Personally, I’d prefer to find a way to accommodate these dips through some manipulation of the surrounding stations, thus maintaining fair curves. But these choices are up to each designer and his preferences. Regardless of whether one might like Davis’ rod, I guess I just don’t understand why we would quibble about whether it qualifies as a convex taper. If one wished to be a purist in such matters, he could call out stations 30 and 65, but otherwise the rod is indeed a convex taper. Where’s the problem? (Bill Harms)
Earlier this year a thread developed on this list regarding the ‘CONVEX’ design/taper developed by Vince Marinaro for a 7’6” 5wt 2pc dry fly rod. Taper data were graciously provided by Jim Sobota. I built one of these rods (using Jim’s data but incorporating an integral bamboo ferrule instead on using the standard NS hardware) and have found that it functions wonderfully. I fished it on Henry’s Fork in Idaho a couple of weeks ago and my guide asked if he could try it (he has 18 years of guide experience on Henry’s Fork and the previous week had guided two gentlemen who both fished bamboo, one of his first experiences with the stuff). After a few casts his face brightened into a broad smile and he told me he wanted one. In fact, he said he REALLY wanted one. At the end of the day, while we were unloading the boat, he showed the rod to a small group of his guide buddies and told them how it cast “short range, long range, and everything in between, almost automatically”. Last week I fished a lower portion of the West Fork of the Bitterroot River in Montana and caught a heavy-shouldered 22” brown trout that my guide estimated to weigh 5.5-6.5 pounds with the rod. I use an SA WF-5-F SharkWave line with it and it all works beautifully. I’m very happy with it. So now I’d like to make a few more of these rods. I’d like to make a 4wt version, another 5wt, and a 6wt version, all in a 3-piece configuration. Can anyone on this list provide the tapers for these rods? Has anyone else had any experience with Marinaro’s ‘Convex’ designs? Will RodDNA reliably convert the 2pc taper to a 3pc configuration? Any data, comments, suggestions, or input would be greatly appreciated. (Bryan Coles) All of the rods I have built have had some variation of convex tapers. I now build mostly 8’6”, 4-piece rods with carbon-fiber sleeve-spigot ferrules and each rod section has a convex character. Particularly effective, in my view, is that the tip section be convex. For my rods, the convexity of the other three sections is less than for the tip. Most of my rods are approximately straight tapers starting about 10-12” back from the tip-top with the convexity superimposed on that taper. A number of people like my rods and I attribute much of that to using convex tapers. For a lot of good information about convex tapers plus tapers themselves, I recommend finding a copy of “Split and Glued by Vince Marinaro” written by Bill Harms and Tom Whittle. My efforts with convex tapers were strongly influenced by Bill! (Tim Anderson) Every tip third to half of every fly or casting rod should have a convex taper. But there can be no technical or any other justification for anything but a concave taper in all or most of the lower half to third of the rod. Just look at the stress curves if you don't believe me. (Robin Haywood) My justification for not using a concave taper away from the tip is what the rods feel like when casting or fishing. I am not going by only my evaluation, but also on the opinions of a number of fine casters at the Golden Gate Angling and Casting Club as well as others who like my rods. That doesn’t mean you would like them, of course. One of the wonderful things about making cane rods is the freedom we have in making a rod we and others like. I do agree that convexity in the taper of the tip is beneficial. I don’t happen to use stress curves in designing my tapers, so have not looked at them for my rods. Nothing wrong with stress curves, they are just not something I use. (Tim Anderson) +1 to what Tim said here, from another convert to convex design. You really should read the book if you want to understand, but be aware that the earlier rods do not always adhere to the principles that Mr. Marinaro worked out over time. The thing to understand is the subtle dips and swells center around the ferrule positions. What he did is to make a long, slow dip going into the ferrule, and then a shorter swell coming out of the ferrule. What I believe he was doing was compensating for the stiffness of the ferrule with the long dip in front of it, and for the weight by the swell behind it. One implication of that is that you cannot add or subtract ferrules with any of the stress based programs, because they will put the dips and swells in the wrong places. Because Tim’s ferrules are extremely light and flexible, he does not need the compensation. If you are using metal ferrules, you should incorporate them. As Tim suggests, the tip seems to be the big difference maker. Having said that, you probably could take the tip design from your rod and run that through a stress program to get that far to begin with. but then you should graph out the rest of the taper, starting out with the base slope of the Marinaro designed sections you like, and adding the subtle swells, sticking close to what Marinaro did on the rod you like. That is how I would proceed, anyway. Avoid big changes in length until you get a feel for how length, ferrule weight and slope affect the action of the rod. (Tom Smithwick) To my previous post, I should add that if you are not changing rod length or number of ferrules, only line weight, a stress based program should actually get you very close. (Tom Smithwick)
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