gnorty

At the risk of giving egg-sucking lessons - this can be avoided by looping the line in the direction away from the join. Unless you mean the eye has burrs inside, which really is unforgivable!

weird. fished in the week with some new 20mm pop-ups (not new boilies, but new to me!) I wanted to balance them, and the thing that made it sink just right was a SSG shot. I used it under the boilie on the hair, like an inverted snowman, but still - nice to know I am one of the front runners on the latest trends Seriosly - I haven't read the article but I imagine the theory is that the carp is working so hard to get the bait swallowed, it misses the hook passing it's lips. Seems like an OK idea, but you would need a bait the fish are really going for. can't see an artificial working for example. Otherwise I am going to start hair rigging pebbles.

No reason why it shouldn't work at all Lead in PVA bag full of crumb, pellets chopped and whole boilies with hook nicked into bag used to work a treat for me. I even used stringers attached to the hook with no problems. Are you suggesting putting the lead, and the hook all in the bag, or just the lead? either way I see a problem with the hook bait finishing up some distance from the freebies (depending on where your rig sits on the line. I have never used PVA with a heli/chod rig although I would like to. The reason I haven't is I see either the hookbait being several feet from the freebies or else a weighty PVA bag pulling the rig out of position on the cast. If I could work around these issues then I would love to hear about it in more detail.

personally I see the stiff hair as a "feature" of mono hooklinks rather than a problem. The stiffness means that the hook position in relation to the bait is somewhat predictable. I guess it depends on the thickness of the nylon used though - I tend to use quite low BS nylon for hooklinks, so it is not really that stiff.

There is not really much strain on the hair - you could probably just lay it along the back of the hook alongside a dummy hair of the hooklength. tie knotless knot and cut the dummy hair as appropriate. can't see a carp sucking that off the hook tbh. personally I just use mono for the hair, but I generally use low BS mono hooklinks as there are very few snags. can cause a problem with pellets as the hair has no purchase on the drilled pellet hole, but specialist pellet stoppers do the job a treat.

no leadcore is obviously safer. use a split shot instead of/next to the locking bead on the lead side of the mainlne , to keep the rig on bottom if you need to.

I wouldn't say I use one every time, but most of the time for sure. A major difference in my rig than what is described here is that I use either a rig ring or a small swivel on the end of my hooklink. This eliminates wear on the hooklink loop from the link. Once the whole thing (quicklink, swivel/ring) is covered in a length of silicon tubing this is a pretty much bombproof solution. The only drawback is that sometimes I need to remove the swivel to thread on a PVA mesh, but it is very easy even with cold hands to loop a swivel onto the link. On the same lines - using a quicklink makes it a very simple matter to tie several identical links and prepare a new PVA bag/link in advance so all you need to do is reel in, swap links and cast out, and no wear to the hooklink

Could the ring cut into the hooklink as it tightened? im not sure that the ring could,but the line could damage the knot........only if the was enough pressure on it ....which i think is unlikley as its only the pressure of sucking/blowing and not playing the fish on the ring/loop plus withthe BS of line used for a chod rig, a small reduction is not the end of the world!

I use a running rig in silt, but you have to be sure the silt is not soft/deep enough for the lead to sink.

no, it's not about critical balance. the rig needs to outweigh the float without the bait (although not by much). When the bait and the bottom hot lifts the float rises, if the fish picks up the bait and swims off, the float dives.

really? I thought the idea was the line below the chod sank into the muck and left the mainline at the chod free. The way you say it the bait would be hanging off the back of a mini flagpole in the silt - I dunno I like that method!

straight hair rig is good, I like to balance my bait on the hair, but it is up to you. use a quicklink on the end of your mainline/lead clip, and then you can construct your PVA bag ready to wind in, clip off the old rig, clip on the new rig/PVA.

an inch of slack will put a length of tubing on the deck. If you really need lines to be tight as a guitar string, then you need to forget about putting the line on the lake bed!

lol - why be embarassed to buy vaseline?? I doubt there are many people using it for "that" use these days when there are proper lubricants etc all over the supermarket!

you never *need* to use tubing. I very rarely do so and it doesn't stop me catching fish. Tubing has it's purposes - to camouflage line and help pin it down. Personally I find that using a sinking line and pulling a *few* inches of line off the spool when setting your rod lays the line flat enough on the bed to avoid spooking fish in the immediate vicinity of the hooklength. If fishing deeper water or at very close range then perhaps a little more slack. That is normally enough. In short, the simpler you can keep your tackle, the less there is to go wrong. don't be seduced by racks of kit in tackle shops, much of it is not essential, and you can spend the money better on good quality hooks etc. a simple sliding rig, with a hook-length of a lighter breaking strain than the mainline is simple, safe and effective. If/when this arrangement is insufficient for a particular problem, then maybe think about a solution, but trying to solve problems before they arise leads to over complex rigs, and if you are not completely certain that the solution is necessary, it is probably better to leave it.