So what's the problem???
well, due to the nature of the two materials - this makes it notoriously difficult to tie without the braid bunching up nicely as you tease the knot down, but then as it tries to get a grip on the mono, it all goes pear-shaped and the braid just slips away to nothing!
Knots such as the FULL BLOOD KNOT just won't work. They are by their nature, strangulation knots which work well on mono's of a similar diameter, and to some extent on different diameter lines - but just not with Braid........
With the braid being a very smooth material with a fine diameter, and the mono being a material that needs some 'bite', tying the two together can seem like an impossibly frustrating task. Worse still is tyrying to tie two completely different diameter's together, for example when tying up a heavy mono shock leader (40lb for example) to a braid of a much finer diameter. Even braids at 40lb breaking strain will be less than half the diameter of the mono, so even though the breaking strain is the same, the actual diameters are worlds apart.
So what's the solution????
Well, after trials with a barrage of knots at the shop, mooching through an old book on knot tying one day, i came across a knot that described itself as......
For tying lines of differing materials and unequal diameter, for example tying backing line to a fly line........
Now how much different in diameter can you get than that? Fly line backing is generally a thick Dacron type material that's usually a bit chunky and the line itself would be a lot smaller in diameter so it had to be worth a go ........
We were actually tying this up for a customer called shaun who's well into his carping and needed to tie a 40lb shock leader to his 12lb braided mainline, so far without success ......
After studying the diagram for a few minutes we tied one up.... now bearing in mind with a decent knot, most 12lb mono's usually break at about 14.5lb 'cos all the manufacturers seem to understate the 'real' breaking strain, it went at a shade over 14lb tied up with no rig glue or anything else done to it, just a straight knot.
Impressed, we tied another, same result. A few practise knots later, a spot of rig glue and we had it breaking just under 15lb !
And the best about it is, the knot ends up very small and neat, it flies through the rod rings without a 'clunk' and, as Shaun later testified, stood up to his rigorous fish playing the next trip out! So confident was he, that he was piling on the power without a second thought.
Now the picture is a scan, not a bad one, so it will 'blow up' a bit if you use the windows picture viewer, just right click on the picture, choose 'save as' and send it somewhere easy to find like your desktop for later use.
If tied correctly and carefully, you will get as near as 100% breaking strain out of your line, put a spot of rig glue on it just to finish it off and see how neatly it turns out......
And the name of this Knot, The ALBRIGHT KNOT.
enjoy
Dave
