Re: What do you feel or sense at the end of the casting stroke?

It was pretty late last night when I spotted your E-mail. Something with AOL has changed within the last couple of years. I used to be able to reply to E-mails with annotations on the original E-mail and I can't seem to do it now. Anyway I'm forwarding your message to my office at the University and will see if I can get a pleasant resolution there. So you can expect a more detailed response later. I'm gratified that are able to reconstruct and understand the various effects but I'll amplify. Good work -- my the way what is your line of work??

I saw your remark about stiffness and didn't think it was serious enough to comment on because it was clear what you were saying from the context. If you were a second or third year engineering student it would have been a different matter. However stiffness doesn't refer to a force (as in "resisting force") --it does refer to the slope of the plot of resisting force versus lateral deflection of the rod. For small deflections of a graphite rod the slope of this curve has a constant value because the curve//plot is a straight line (hence this range of response is technically called "linear"). Just as a note of interest (and because it is very important) when the response is linear there will be a first mode of vibration with a specific//constant natural frequency which then dictates that the rod unloads in a specific time duration (assuming the attached fly line weight has a specific value) regardless of amount of rod defection//loading. Hence the effect that larger rod deflections lead to proportionately larger free flight line speeds. However the linear response is achieved very well in practice with modest rod deflections but the "force//defection curve" bends over as rod deflections increase due to rod cross-sectioning ovaling and other effects we call large deflection//distortion effects so the benefits of large rod loading drop do not accumulate as rapidly as the simple theory predicts. Some, like Gordy have heard of the effects of nonlinear material response but I can assure you there is absolutey no nonlinear response when using graphite rods. I've paid considerable amounts of contract dollars to verify that graphite composites of interest perform just like the parent material -- they failure due to elastic ductility exhaustion (meaning is clear from choice of words -- fiber rupture in elastic range).