Room 101 Floats

[Bayleaf]

Can only agree with most of your comments JAA, to my mind floats are to be used and anything that makes then less able is pointless. I really can't understand why people want some of the pointless 'designer' floats that are sold, just my personal opinion!

[Santiago]

Luckily I'm just a pleasure angler and find that most floats catch . If I miss too many bites I change my set up, sometimes to a more sensitive one , and sometimes to one that is less sensitive. Often dotting a float right down to the tip is a mistake , especially when the fish are finicky and need more time to get the bait into their mouths. Walker wrote about this in one of his books! Regardless, so long as one enjoys their float fishing is the main thing , regardless of catch .

[DaceAce]

Black tips are essential on big sky waters where there's that expanse of white water. In my match days that included waters such as the Thames, Trent, Witham and the larger local stillwaters I carried a selection of black-tipped floats including mainly wagglers but also sticks. On a small pond there is much more likelihood of a green background and a red or orange float is usually more visible.

Using a black-tipped float on the Thames:

IMG_9142.JPG

[Barbelbonce]

...Belgow Fluted Avons were machined out of box wood or beech,

- from JAA.

Boxwood is a very slow-growing, close-grained, hard and dense timber with a specific gravity of about 1 which means it is about the same weight as water in kg/m3.
It was used for finely-worked items demandind great accuracy and stability such as chess-pieces, the best engineering scale-rules and much, much else.
It was and is a very expensive timber.
Did messrs. Belglow really use a very expensive, potentially sinking timber to make floats?
I've had a look at some of mine and it is impossible to see the timber for paint!
Mike

p.s. This site is a really useful resource for all things engineering; I refer to it a lot: https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/wood ... -d_40.html

[DaceAce]

A wood widely used around 50 years ago was obeche. I've got a feeling that some of the so-called 'fake sticks' were made of single pieces of obeche with the bottom half varnished, the top half painted to resemble a proper stick float though they were useless.

[JAA]

...Belgow Fluted Avons were machined out of box wood or beech,

- from JAA.

Boxwood is a very slow-growing, close-grained, hard and dense timber with a specific gravity of about 1 which means it is about the same weight as water in kg/m3.
It was used for finely-worked items demandind great accuracy and stability such as chess-pieces, the best engineering scale-rules and much, much else.
It was and is a very expensive timber.
Did messrs. Belglow really use a very expensive, potentially sinking timber to make floats?
I've had a look at some of mine and it is impossible to see the timber for paint!
Mike

p.s. This site is a really useful resource for all things engineering; I refer to it a lot: https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/wood ... -d_40.html

Ah...probably beech or summat cheap then, it's quite close grained though - I stripped one using nitromoors to find out.

It does look like it might be obeche, but I'm no expert.