When I use Stuart Tuff Butts I don't always insert the blank all the way to the bottom. With the Tuff Butt's integral aluminium tubing I often only have 4-5" of blank epoxied in. My question is in reguards to the ash butts used on some lighter boat rods. Since ash is such a hard wood is it necessary to pull the blank all the way through the butt or is it ok to leave part of the butt 'empty' like I often do my Stuart butts? Jay

You can go very wrong on those ash butts if you don't go all way in and through. Some boat rods, of course, had solid ash or hickory butts that were shouldered to hold the reel seat and the blank was fastened in a short plug ferrule for the other end of the seat. The whole assembly always looked suspect to me, but many, many thousands and thousands of these have been sold and did the job with no problems. The reels seats were usually pretty heavy chrome over brass affairs though.

If you're working with a hollow ash butt, then sleeve the entire rod blank. If it's solid, however, you might get by with the arrangement I mentioned above.

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Thank you Mr. Tom. I have not used one of these butts before...never actually seen one off a rod. Mud Hole sales them bored and solid. Might would have to ream them slightly to accept the blank, but maybe that would be ok. Thanks again. Jay

If it is a trolling rod then you want to use a bored wood butt, the smaller "Bottom Rods" I cut the tang back to about an inch and then bore it about 4" which puts the blank back into the meat of the butt which is plenty on the small rods.Jesse