My first foray into experimenting with a two-handed rod has been to rebuild a rod that was originally built as a surf rod. The original builder used a two-handed blank by Daiwa UK., the Amorphous Whisker, 12 feet for 6/7/8 weight lines in three pieces. I am only rebuilding the butt section in order to upgrade the reel seat and make the grips a proper length for two-handed casting. I have the butt grip installed as well as the new reel seat, but am wondering how best to glue up the fore grip. I reamed and fitted each cork ring and they are all fitted to the blank with no glue. Looking at it, I am thinking that I need to glue the rings together while on the blank and likewise epoxy the rings to the blank at the same time. That means shaping the grip for the finished handle in place. I am wondering if there might be a better way to approach this. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks All

Steve Cole

Steve,
Now that you've already reamed the cork rings, there really aren't too many more options that are easy that I know of (there might be a million and one that I don't know!!!!) In the future, try this. Glue the cork rings together on a separate dowel in a cork clamp. I use a long threaded metal rod and use washers as buffers when using nuts on opposite ends of the cork to clamp them down. Make sure you don't glue the cork to the dowel!!!! Make sure there is sufficient length of the dowel (or metal rod) to go into a drill or lathe chuck. That way it's easier to chape with the help of a high speed drill and some sandpaper. I finish shaping most of my grips in less than five minutes. This includes finishing. The reaming is adifferent story! Cheers.

The method you described is what I do when building the shorter grips for single-handed rods (half-wells, full-wells etc). I just didn't see that as practical when in the end I would have to ream a grip that was 14 inches in length in order to get the fit for this rod. Maybe I was mistaken and should have tried to build the grip as you described. I have another two-handed blank that I will be working on as soon as I finish the current project. I will try the method using the metal dowel with that foregrip and see how it shakes out. Thanks for the reply.

Steve,
I'm kind of in the same boat, building a 15' 3pc spey rod.
The fore grip comes in at around 15"
Here's what I'm thinking.
Ream each ring to fit the blank.
build a mandrel out of threaded rod like Chia says.
Build up under each ring a necessary with tape.
glue up the grip in 3 5" sections clamp and turn.
Now I have basically 3 seperate grips.
Apply glue to the blank and the dry grip ends where needed.
Clamp again and touch up by hand.
I would glue it up on the blank but spinning a 5' piece of graphite kind of scares me.