Air Force F40

The F40 is the flagship of the Air Force series, built for casts past 200 metres from blanks rolled in 40 tonne Japanese Toray carbon with a deliberately low resin content, so the rod keeps its fast recovery through long sessions of repeated casting. A 45-degree multi-directional reinforcement resists blank twist under full compression, which is what preserves accuracy at the extreme end of the range; a 12ft blank weighs in the region of 330 grams.

The hardware matches the casting brief. The guide train steps down from a 50mm double-leg butt ring through 30mm and 25mm double-leg intermediates and 20mm and 16mm single-leg runners to a 16mm anti-tangle tip, managing shockleader knots and coils off a big-spool reel, and the reel sits in an American Tackle 1K carbon pipe seat. Offered at 12ft in 3.5lb and 3.75lb test curves, the F40 is the rod the rest of the range is measured against: the F20's launch story was that testers could not tell the two apart.