I've never fished or built a fly rod with single foot guides with inserts before. I've got a 8/9wt fiberglass blank that I'm about to start in on, and I'm considering trying out these single foot guides. I've always used traditional snake guides without any problems. But I think the intended use of this rod is more about ease of shooting and stripping line. The rod will mostly be used with multi tip lines, saltwater floating lines and possibly a OPST Commando system. I was looking at the American Tackle Titan fly guides with the Nanolite inserts and wanted to know recommended guide sizing including stripping guide and also how these compare performance and weight wise with traditional snake guides or other options like the Fuji TLSG guides. Thanks for any guidance.

Andrew,

I have used ceramic rings on fly rods with both double footed guides and single footed guides. I did not see any improvement in casting distance or presentation. I did notice a slowing of the action--particularly with light weight rods (4 and 5 weight). If you are going to use this rod in saltwater I recommend Titanium Alloy frames and going with Silicon Carbide rings. I also recommend a fanatic cleaning procedure that I use. When finished fishing I rinse the rod with water. I follow this with a wash in warm sudsy water and then another rinse. I then hand dry the rod followed by placing the rod in a cloth rod sock. I used this method with a surf rod I built over 40 years ago with guides from Mildrum with steel frames and rings with chrome coating. The tip top was a tungsten carbide ring with a nickel silver frame. After all those years the only corrosion was found where the ring of the tip top was soldered to the frame. At the junction there just a small amount of green color from the copper in the nickel silver frame.

On fly rods I have gone back to snake guides since I get good casting distances with less weight. I hope this helps. I am sure you will hear from others that supports using the ceramic rings.

Good luck with your project.

Mike Blomme

The more weight you add to a rod the more the speed (reaction and recovery time) will be reduced. Depending on the weight of the guides in questions compared to what you normally use, you may seen only a tiny difference, or a significant one. Ceramic inserts tend to protect line, pay it out under pressure a bit better, etc., but won't really increase your casting distance to any practical degree. There just isn't enough friction between line and guide surface during the cast to make any measurable casting difference.

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Test to make sure the guide rings are large enough for the leader-to-line and the line-to-backing connections to pass through smoothly and easily.

I built an 8wt rod for salmon and steelhead using single foot guides for use with a multi-head system and found that even though the guides were large enough the loop-to-loop connections still got hung up when stripping right to the tip-top (which is required when fishing for certain species.
I stripped off the single foots and replaced with snake guides with the same diameter. No more hang-ups when stripping.

Andrew,
Heed the above advice and nix the ceramics.
To improve performance the best thing is to keep the line off the blank to reduce friction there.
The way to do that is to use REC Recoil single foot spinning guides - RSPG. Use a Fuji #16 Titanium frame with either Torzite or SiC rings as the stripper.
Then a #10 RSPG, #8 RSPG and then either #8L RSPG or #7 RSPG for runners. The #8 will give you a little more room. But the #7 will be lighter. I used the #8's on my #8 saltwater fly rod that I will probably overline with a floater so I needed more clearance.
Use the REC recoil tip-top in a small ring or a Snakebrand with ECOating in small ring. Lighter than their chromed.
Have fun,
Herb

Thanks for the replies all. i'm going to stick with the standard snake guides. I think the multi tip lines ave a good chance of getting caught up in the single foots.