MKIV pecking order

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GloucesterOldSpot

Re: MKIV pecking order

Post by GloucesterOldSpot »

Snape wrote:
farliesbirthday wrote:I think there's confusion here between the Mk III and the MK II - the former was the double-built rod used by Walker to catch the 34lb common in 1954, and - so far as I understand (Chris Ball, please help!) - it is both heavier and stiffer than a MK IV, with a slightly higher test curve...
When we saw the MKIII at Chris Ball's house he said it was a lot heavier (being double built) but wasn't much stiffer bizarrely.
The MKII was the 'whopper stopper' named by Maurice Ingham which was a lot stiffer.
I beg to differ; the MkII was a ten foot two piece split cane with a test curve of about 1.25lb. There's an article about it in one of the early Waterlogs, including a photo. This was the rod Walker was using when he hooked the nine pound carp at Lackey's Leap - about which BB wrote several accounts, all of which went on to form the bulk of a certain LEP book...

(For the record the MkI was supposedly a Wallis Avon with a foot cut off the tip).

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Snape
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Re: MKIV pecking order

Post by Snape »

gloucesteroldspot wrote:
Snape wrote:
farliesbirthday wrote:I think there's confusion here between the Mk III and the MK II - the former was the double-built rod used by Walker to catch the 34lb common in 1954, and - so far as I understand (Chris Ball, please help!) - it is both heavier and stiffer than a MK IV, with a slightly higher test curve...
When we saw the MKIII at Chris Ball's house he said it was a lot heavier (being double built) but wasn't much stiffer bizarrely.
The MKII was the 'whopper stopper' named by Maurice Ingham which was a lot stiffer.
I beg to differ; the MkII was a ten foot two piece split cane with a test curve of about 1.25lb. There's an article about it in one of the early Waterlogs, including a photo. This was the rod Walker was using when he hooked the nine pound carp at Lackey's Leap - about which BB wrote several accounts, all of which went on to form the bulk of a certain LEP book...

(For the record the MkI was supposedly a Wallis Avon with a foot cut off the tip).
Interesting...
I always thought the MKIII was the whopper stopper but Chris Ball didn't think so so we concluded that the MKII was the whopper stopper but maybe not....
I am sure the MKI was the cut down Wallis Avon though.
“Fishing is much more than fish. It is the great occasion when we may return to the fine simplicity of our forefathers,” Herbert Hoover.
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GloucesterOldSpot

Re: MKIV pecking order

Post by GloucesterOldSpot »

Snape wrote:
gloucesteroldspot wrote:
Snape wrote:
farliesbirthday wrote:I think there's confusion here between the Mk III and the MK II - the former was the double-built rod used by Walker to catch the 34lb common in 1954, and - so far as I understand (Chris Ball, please help!) - it is both heavier and stiffer than a MK IV, with a slightly higher test curve...
When we saw the MKIII at Chris Ball's house he said it was a lot heavier (being double built) but wasn't much stiffer bizarrely.
The MKII was the 'whopper stopper' named by Maurice Ingham which was a lot stiffer.
I beg to differ; the MkII was a ten foot two piece split cane with a test curve of about 1.25lb. There's an article about it in one of the early Waterlogs, including a photo. This was the rod Walker was using when he hooked the nine pound carp at Lackey's Leap - about which BB wrote several accounts, all of which went on to form the bulk of a certain LEP book...

(For the record the MkI was supposedly a Wallis Avon with a foot cut off the tip).
Interesting...
I always thought the MKIII was the whopper stopper but Chris Ball didn't think so so we concluded that the MKII was the whopper stopper but maybe not....
I am sure the MKI was the cut down Wallis Avon though.
Maybe the Whopper Stopper Ingham referred to was the rod described in DMAL? There's no surviving evidence I'm aware of that Walker ever built a rod to those dimensions - merely an implicit suggestion in the letters to Ingham that rods made to Walkers designs by J.B.Walker had turned out alright. If the order was as follows:

MkI - cut down Wallis Avon
MkII - 1.25lb test ten foot straight taper all-split-cane (this rod had green intermediate whippings, brown ring and ferrule whippings and clear agate rings throughout, with a 24" cork handle featuring a tapered faring cone at the fore-end)
MkIII - double-built rod now with Chris Ball
MkIV - single-built compound taper ten footer

then it seems the heavy straight taper rod described in the letters and built by Ingham was not included in Walker's numbering sequence. If he never actually built it, that would be a plausible reason. Ingham clearly did, and seemingly found it too powerful for middle-sized carp (though I'd hardly call ten minutes 'a bit too quick'!). Maybe it was a design intended to improve on the MkII (possibly a simple increase in diameter throughout) that was shelved when the idea for the MkIII occurred?

Interestingly, In Mike Winter's book 'Along Fishermans Paths' he cites his MkIII as being 'a very powerful bit of stick'. The question then is upon which design was Winter's MkIII made?

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Snape
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Re: MKIV pecking order

Post by Snape »

I now can't recall where the reference to the 'whopper stopper' came from.
But I seem to remember there was a letter? in which Walker talks about a rod which he says Maurice calls the whopper stopper.
Maybe in the Carp Catchers' Club?
I'll need to get digging as this is bugging me.
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Gary Bills
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Re: MKIV pecking order

Post by Gary Bills »

Yes, Snape, it may be in the letters - and also in Ingham's last book, "Woldale". If I recall correctly, the Whopper Stopper was seen as a prototype Mk IV, and it was a heavier rod than later versions. The interesting thing about the Mk III was that Walker continued to use it...

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Re: MKIV pecking order

Post by Snape »

farliesbirthday wrote:Yes, Snape, it may be in the letters - and also in Ingham's last book, "Woldale". If I recall correctly, the Whopper Stopper was seen as a prototype Mk IV, and it was a heavier rod than later versions. The interesting thing about the Mk III was that Walker continued to use it...
Yes. I'm thinking it was a different rod altogether and wasn't part of the MKIV evolution.
“Fishing is much more than fish. It is the great occasion when we may return to the fine simplicity of our forefathers,” Herbert Hoover.
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SeanM
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Re: MKIV pecking order

Post by SeanM »

Here you go chaps. On the right towards the bottom are 4 pdf files containg an article by Chris Ball which answers most of the questions above:

http://www.bruceandwalker.co.uk/history
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SeanM
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Re: MKIV pecking order

Post by SeanM »

Here's something I posted on TPBTW earlier that my be of interest:

Whilst we are on the subject of Rod Building for Amateurs here is something that has been niggling me for a while.

Several people have referred to the taper tables on page 75 when talking about the dimensions of a Mk IV and, sure enough, on my copy column 8 of the table, is labelled "rod for heavy carp, barbel, etc". Now this book was published in 1952, which implies that Walker had developed the taper for this rod some time prior to that, so where does this rod fit into the Mk IV chronology? Although it has a wooden handle the taper is pretty much that of the final MkIV as the graph below shows:


Image

I've plotted the Walker taper (RBFA) against the published Chapmans tapers for their versions of the Mk IV (I've just noticed that I've made a typo on the 550 and called it a 500)and as you can see the tip tapers are identical and the butt taper of the 550 is pretty much identical to the RBFA rod. Dimensions are strip dimensions which are half the a/f dimension.

If anyone has the proper Mk IV dimensions I'll add them to the graph.

This is probably not of earth shattering importance, but I do find it interesting to deconstruct the development process!
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Beresford
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Re: MKIV pecking order

Post by Beresford »

Very interesting (to me) to see the the tapers plotted like that.


And now it's possible to buy a MkIV Avon S/U…

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/New-Avon-MKIV ... 500wt_1146
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Re: MKIV pecking order

Post by Snape »

Beresford wrote:And now it's possible to buy a MkIV Avon S/U…

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/New-Avon-MKIV ... 500wt_1146
EH? How does that work - isn't a S/U MKIV avon a MKIV carp?
“Fishing is much more than fish. It is the great occasion when we may return to the fine simplicity of our forefathers,” Herbert Hoover.
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