About 19 years ago I was introduced to rod building by Daryll Whitehead and he encouraged me to develop a series of fly rod guides. As the result of this encouragement I left a well paying engineering job and started Snake Brand Guides.

I recognized that the reduction of weight affected even the best designed fly rods and that is why I designed guides each having its own wire diameter to complement the guides location on the fly rod which was an industry first. Our original design utilized high carbon steel but after having numerous conversations with respected rod builders and companies we recognized that off-shore suppliers of components were experiencing rust issues even on guides that had a coating of chrome plating. This prompted me to explore using a superior grade of stainless steel that had terrific rust resistivity properties. Even though we incurred more expense with this alloy Snake Brand Guides has always been committed to Quality, Uniformity and Consistency.

For these reasons I wanted to hire an Independent Testing Laboratory to conduct comprehensive tests to see how our guides would perform in a Salt Fog environment. We determined that the test to be conducted would last for 1200 hours and that we would submit rod section samples for both our Black Nickel and Chrome Plating . The results surpassed my expectations and we even submitted non-plated guides which exhibited no degradation to our alloy. Check out our Salt Fog Test Results.

Snake Brand Guides is pleased to share that our guides are Proudly Made Here in America and we hope that you will choose our guides for your next project. World Class Rods deserve World Class Guides.