L.O.S.T. post on Rodbuilding.org forum

[CALCOfshr]

Dave,
I watched you describe it to Doc. Thats when it fully sunk in BEST. As for the rest of this thread, I won't go into all of it. I will add that some publisher may or may not be miffed. That is most likely due to where your article on your concept was originally put into a "printed" publication. I guess its something about "personalities before principles" thing. Meaning an ego got bruised,perhaps. You know about that already,whereas others don't. Old feud that isn't ours. Nuff said.
The bottom line is custom rodbuilding and why we do it. Whatever methods we use, to produce a rod better for either personal,or customer needs is ALL that should matter in the end. Not petty nonsense.
Peace out everyone,
Chuck

[Comedie]

Originally Posted by Russ57

Perhaps you guys can clue me in on the basic details of Dave's system? I only know the little I have seen on-line. That tells me he feels the guides load the blank and one needs to place them so the line contacts them. I load the blank from the tip alone and then place the guides so that the line from the reel follows the curve of the blank when so loaded.

I guess I'm of the frame of mind that all blanks perform best as a cane poles and the second we start putting stuff on them we are heading downhill. I just try to place my "stuff" so the rod bends the same way it would if fished like a cane pole.

But then I'm a caveman who hasn't built much in the last 30 years so please educate me

Yeah I've heard the bit about a rod loads by the tip. It ain't exactly true. What you do in the guidetrain can influence how the blank visibly bends. More importantly, the guidetrain will change how the blank is stressed even when you can't see it.
Put just a few guides on a rod and load up the guidetrain. The rod doesn't bend the same, does it. That's because the guides and the line tension between them are bending the rod in a manner like a compound bow. OK,,, so add enough guides and you should see the bend go more toward what you see from loading the blank w/o the guide train. That's because you have spread the line tension load over the blank and now deny a large part of the compounded leverage between guides.

If you got that, then you understand. It is one of the things that tuning during static testing does afterall,,, minimizing and balancing out the line angles at the guides. So nothing new there,,, just perhaps a different light shed on the value of static testing.

Now,,,,, work the thought in reverse. Start with a perfectly balanced rod. What happens when you remove a guide under load? The rest of the guidetrain readjusts to carry that load now, and primarily the guides on either side of what you removed. Those two guides now want to pull towards each other more than before, and in doing so apply more stress to the blank between them. Now consider that removing the guide is the same thing as having a guide that carries no load.

That line of thinking is what was behind LOST in the first place. To not leave any large sections of blank unprotected. And because of the line path change a spiral has in transition from top to bottom, a spiral is predisposed to have this problem in spades. The taller the reel, thicker the blank, and the closer to the reel the transition from top to bottom is, the worse the problem can be.

So load/stress distribution is a key piece of LOST. But there is another piece in there.... line path. The low stripper and 1st 180, and the 'wave' in the running guide sizing is not just about loading. Put a somewhat flexy piece of plastic dowel thru the tip, a first 180 guide, and then on top of the reel spool. The shape it will form is quite similar to what you see in LOST. And the reason it forms that shape between those 3 points is because that is the path of least resistance thru those points for that dowel. What it is doing is avoiding acute linepath changes in a small distance. And that's the other piece of what LOST is up to.

Easy to see in real time and hands on, and a real bugger to write up concisely.

[OSiDE FiSHER]

Sounds good Dave.You proved this method by fact and many tests,and thats more then anybody who has put this down has done.Personally I think your rods are awesome.

[Red Monster]

Frankly, it is simple enough that I've yet to see a single person not understand it when they actually tried. And because of the simplicity, it leaves only a few reasons for someone to say bad things:
* they simply don't care (in which case they'd be quiet anyway)
* they haven't even bothered to understand it
* they suffer from Not Invented Here syndrome
* they feel the need to defend what poor spirals they've done (which BTW also means they opened their eyes enough to recognize it)
* they feel they've fallen off their ego throne
* they are brain cell deferring and listen to someone else suffering from some mix of the aforementioned
* they are part of that 50% who are below median intelligence

I tink tose are some of those purdy werds you was talkin about!!!

[Russ57]

Thanks Dave. Where can I read about your system in more detail? Computer at work won't let me play too much and my connection at home is slow. So if you have a link....or someplace I can buy....that would be appreciated.

[minner]

Dave I get it, I think, but can you help me better understand why the ascending–descending guide sizes in the "train"?

Thanks,
Allen


Thanks,
Allen

[Comedie]

Originally Posted by minner

Dave I get it, I think, but can you help me better understand why the ascending–descending guide sizes in the "train"?

Several ways to describe why those are there. The best is to actually try it and see the load dynamics w/ and w/o doing the wave.

Here's a pic of the first one I called LOST: Custom Rod Builders Guild . Probably the crudist LOST of all (for instance, today I would probably shoehorn in another guide). But it gets the idea across.
See the top pic with no load? Look at the line path and note that it redirects at the 1st 180. Call the line on the left A, and on the right B. For the 1st 180 to get downward load, that AB angle needs to invert.

Because the reel is fixed and the stripper already low, you can't lower that leg. But the A leg can be lowered by having a taller 2nd 180.
Now look at the 3rd, 2nd, and 1st 180 guides with that same thought process with angle AB centered at the 2nd 180. The B leg guides you just set in the last iteration, so to get downward load into the 2nd 180, the 3rd 180 now is adjusted.

The other variable in getting load to the guides is the blank and how it bends under load, The closer you get to the tip, the easier it is to lower the A leg of the angle by rod bend. That is the general idea of why that wave forms.

In practice, I static test all the guides after setting the 1st 180 in place, with the rule that the guides load sequentially from tip to stripper as load is increased, and that they are all loaded at least by the time I have 25% of the blank's low line rating on the line. That's my line in the sand for a good LOST. If, however, all the guides are not loaded by the time you get 25% of the high line rating on the line load, that is a failure (25% is the most recommended drag setting, so if a guide isn't loaded at 25% of high rating, it never will).

[Comedie]

Originally Posted by Russ57

Thanks Dave. Where can I read about your system in more detail? Computer at work won't let me play too much and my connection at home is slow. So if you have a link....or someplace I can buy....that would be appreciated.

Someday I'll get around to writing it all up nicely with pics. What I do have out there is:
Custom Rod Builders Guild Forums: LOST simplification on the mechanics of laying out a LOST

An earlier write up is: Custom Rod Builders Guild Forums: LOST - optimizing the SS
And then thoughts on the line path of least resistance: Custom Rod Builders Guild Forums: LOST Simplified2

When you get deeper into this stuff you come to a chicken and egg problem. Is it the blank that loads the guides, or the guides that load the blank? All depends upon your reference point I think. The blank plus the guidetrain together form a system with each influencing the other. So identifying cause and effect becomes interesting, but largely academic. By tuning the system as a whole in static testing, however, you never need to address such stuff.

[minner]

Ok, makes sense to me. I would be curious to see how it would work out in a labwith some strain guages on guides and some along th blank as well as you move the guides around.

One thing I thought of as I was reading about about keeping the angles equal but opposite, is that the actual load applied to the blank at the guide position is very small in relation to the tension of the rod. For instance if you are talking about 12lbs of line tension and the loaded guides have tangent angles of 10-15 degrees, the guide (and therefore blank at that position) is only experiencing a small load by deflecting the line, maybe 2-3 pounds. I guess that is part of LOST as well, distributing the loads (even though thier just 2-3 pounds) along the blank so as to eliminate hot spots of tension and compression along the curve.

[Comedie]

Originally Posted by minner

Ok, makes sense to me. I would be curious to see how it would work out in a labwith some strain guages on guides and some along th blank as well as you move the guides around.

One thing I thought of as I was reading about about keeping the angles equal but opposite, is that the actual load applied to the blank at the guide position is very small in relation to the tension of the rod. For instance if you are talking about 12lbs of line tension and the loaded guides have tangent angles of 10-15 degrees, the guide (and therefore blank at that position) is only experiencing a small load by deflecting the line, maybe 2-3 pounds. I guess that is part of LOST as well, distributing the loads (even though thier just 2-3 pounds) along the blank so as to eliminate hot spots of tension and compression along the curve.

Yep, good thought along those lines.
There are different ways to think about it. For instance, is it the guide pulling the blank down, or it is the blank bending up and pulling against the line tension of the guide? Both really.
The strain gauge thought would be nice for the blank. You don't need it on the guides tho. The line angles cover that. I had thought that putting a diffraction grating on the blank would be interesting to see the stresses. The piece that is unknown is exactly how much a particular blank section can handle before it snaps.
So that is why LOST tries very much to distribute the loads and not allow guide leverage to compound. As blanks get lighter and thinner walled, it becomes more and more important.

[E. Harry]

Minner,
I think that your post hints at the problem that some see in Dave's logic. For any given load, angle to that load and angle of the rod to the water or the ground the guides can be positioned on a blank so as to distribute the load evenly between the guides. However, if the load changes or the angle to the load changes or the angle that the rod is relative to the water changes then the load on the indivual guides will change.

For example, when you have a load on a rod if you lift the tip of the rod the distribution of that load tends to move toward the tip of the rod. If you raise it too much we call that high sticking. If you do the opposite and drop the tip of the rod the load tends to move toward the butt of the rod. In the first case there is practically no load on the guides near the butt of the rod. Almost all of the load is on the guides near the tip of the rod. In the second case almost all of the load will be on the guides near the butt of the rod and very little of the load on the guides near the tip of the rod.

It is not possible to position the guides on a rod so that the load on the guides is the same or equal under all conditions. The best that we can do is to position the guides so that under a relatively heavy load on the rod the guides are roughly loaded equally. But the load that we select and the amount of rod deflection is a judgment call and somewhat arbitrary.

[Comedie]

Originally Posted by E. Harry

Minner,
I think that your post hints at the problem that some see in Dave's logic. For any given load, angle to that load and angle of the rod to the water or the ground the guides can be positioned on a blank so as to distribute the load evenly between the guides. However, if the load changes or the angle to the load changes or the angle that the rod is relative to the water changes then the load on the indivual guides will change.

For example, when you have a load on a rod if you lift the tip of the rod the distribution of that load tends to move toward the tip of the rod. If you raise it too much we call that high sticking. If you do the opposite and drop the tip of the rod the load tends to move toward the butt of the rod. In the first case there is practically no load on the guides near the butt of the rod. Almost all of the load is on the guides near the tip of the rod. In the second case almost all of the load will be on the guides near the butt of the rod and very little of the load on the guides near the tip of the rod.

It is not possible to position the guides on a rod so that the load on the guides is the same or equal under all conditions. The best that we can do is to position the guides so that under a relatively heavy load on the rod the guides are roughly loaded equally. But the load that we select and the amount of rod deflection is a judgment call and somewhat arbitrary.

Sorta,,,, but the kicker is that if you are not distributing the loads across the guidetrain at horizontal, and now you raise the tip, the resulting distribution will be far worse. As you incline the rod, less and less load gets to the rear guides. So the more of it you start with back there the better, while also not allowing large unsupported areas to form, which will allow compound leverage to build in those areas.

In other words, you risk a highstick break earlier if not distributing loads well.