Hi everyone
Thanks for alerting me to this post, Colin. I was on the original committee that was tasked with providing a "standard", so if it is okay, I'll jump in with a few comments here:
The standards were approved in September 2004 by AFTTA. It was a bit of a surprise that they were approved when they were because initially the idea was to form an outline of an idea to standardize salmon/spey rods. The suggestions were presented to Bruce Richards, who then presented them to the AFFTA board. The AFFTA board then surprised everyone by approving it!
There are certainly a couple of flaws with this standard. Firstly, the standard was suggested before there was such a thing as a skagit line, so these were not included. Secondly, the standard is based more on the US anglers idea of what loads a rod well. Most European casters prefer a lighter line weight than the standard suggests. Also, the 40ft head length for shooting heads is too long for modern heads.
There is a (sort of) a pdf file on the RIO web site
here that outlines this a touch more.
With regard to the grain weight being different for different head lengths of line, that is easy. With short head lines, like a Scandinavian shooting head, most of the casting power is going to come off the tip of the rod with a short casting stroke - this will produce tight, sweet loops and effortless casts. With a long belly line you need a very long casting stroke, and the rod has to load much deeper into the butt to be able to carry the long lengths of line. You could never cast a 75' head length of line just off the tip of the rod. As a result, the longer belly lines have more weight to get that flex deeper into the rod.
As I said, the standard is not right, and I honestly don't think the standard can ever be right, but then nor is the single handed standard these days, and, as someone pointed out, rods don't even have a standard, so there can never be a true match!
Cheers for now
Simon
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