Well its been a few days but I have been busy. I finally finished that Thor pen for David. I had an allergy war and was fighting sinus headache for about three days so it took me bit longer to get it done than I wanted.
I have also started a few more rod projects. It is going to be a while before I finish that Winston handle carving ... so in the mean time I am building a few Salmon rods. My dad, a few friends and I are going Salmon fishing in WI in October so I need to get my rods done fairly soon.
These two rods of mine are not going to be art rods but just good using rods with a few fancy touches. Since they are for me I am using them to experiment on. Both are being built on unsanded 9' 9wt 3pc fly rod blanks from Dancraft. I really like the looks of the ridges spiraling up an unsanded blank so I got excited when I heard Dancraft had these on clearance.
The first thing I did was sand down the reinforcement wraps at the ferrules of the blanks. The wraps stood pretty proud on the bottom but they look nice now that they are sanded and profiled a bit. Once that was done, I put a coat of perma-gloss on for a rod finish (pic #1). Boy did that make the blank come to life.
The next step was to wrap the ferules with some gray size D nylon thread so they don't split when the rod is flexed (pic #2).
Since I generally like to prepare the parts before I get to far along the next thing I did was to taper and sand the feet on the guides. Dancraft also had these sic guides with plated stainless frames on clearance so I grabbed those up to use on these rods. I generally don't like plated guides but the wallet won the day this time. My favorite guides are Ti framed gold cermit or sic guides. I made jigs to hold the feet by drilling and tapping a piece of nylon rod and using a nylon screw to hold the guides through the ring without harming the inserts (pic #3). I use my powerhone with a diamond lap to grind the feet (pic#4). This set up gives me long, clean tapers and a very nice finish on the feet. The slow moving powerhone also grinds the feet fairly quickly without getting them hot.
It was too hot out in the garage today to spend too much time out there but I did manage to get the cork rings picked out, arranged, and drilled (pic #5). After they were all drilled I glued them up on a mandrel to be lathe turned into a handle. I use System-3 boat building epoxy to glue up my rods and cork. There may be better products out there that are geared specifically to rod building but I have to do something with this 3 gallons of System-3 I have left over from boat projects.
I hope to get a lot more done on this tomorrow.
4 comments:
Awesome powerhone, I had to grind the guides feet of my first rod with a file. In any case, this is a nice blog. Thank you. You will find my first rod here. For future rod projects I am going to write more detailed documentations...
And please excuse my two deleted comments, I obviously should proofread them first.
Post a Comment