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?