Yesterday a friend gave me a couple of the Zebco "TAT" action crappie rods, and I was struck by how LIGHT the tip is. Of course the rod is far inferior to what we can build custom, and I suspect it is largely fiberglass, but the tip was as small as anything I have ever seen. I haven't measured it, but I've built on numerous blanks with a 3.5 tip and this looks smaller than those. It seems with these Zebco rigs the intent was to make the tip so light that the tiniest nibbles would be visible at the end of the rod.

Are there any high quality blanks sort of designed for the same thing - say light biting crappie in deep water?

None that I have seen. Most higher quality blanks are built for "feel" strike detection not "sight".

Thanks - Marc

Keep it simple - that's all I can handle!

The old solid tipped Flea Flicker Clemens blanks and the Zebco Micros, also built with solid tips were that way. Wish I had back some of the Clemens blanks I built.
I bet some of the Micros have survived to be garage sale finds, they had what looked like very small SF fly guides and tips on them..

Spencer...you are not the only one that wishes he some of those "Flea Flickers" back.

If you look at teh Japan Fuji site, they have quite aq number of tip tops for sizes .7, .8. .9, 1, 1.1 and 1.2mm tops, which are all smaller than a size 3 for our sizes. I do not know what they are using these blanks with such a small diameter for, but I can assure you that if they come out in the US there will be people acting as if they found something new, when it's just that we are pretty far behind Japan when it comes to new stuff, we're just a lot louder about it.