As part of a barter deal to get some paint work done on my jeep I took on the restoration of the painters favorite rod.Over the years he had applied body repair epoxy(not bondo) over the guide wraps and rings to hold it all together.Luckely a little heat softens it up for removal although it pulls up the blank finish on the edges(dont want to put heat here).The fixed end of the reel seat is broken off and replaced with mechanics wire and black electrical tape.I saw him catch 49 striped bass between 28 and 37 inches one night on the rod in this form.The work going to be well worth it though.So what are some of your worst stories??

Freddwhy (Rapt-Ryte)

The worst repair I had to do was when the owner rewrapped three guides with sewing thread and coated with super glue, alot of thread and alot of super glue!!! I never realized until that day how hard super glue got and how gast it dulls razor blades. It took me forever to get those guides off!!!
Noel

I don't know--if the paint job was worth it and the blank still available, I think I might would start over from scratch and build him a new rod--less work!

Worst repair, probably one of my own. I built a Sage RPL, I guess in the late 80's and used Crystal Coat on the guides. That rod served me very well until around 2000 when my son tried it and found he liked it a lot better than an old rod I was letting him use. So before a trip we took in 2001, we decided to build a rod for him. While doing his rod, I decided to spruce up the guide wraps on my RPL using a guide epoxy I decided to try. I learned the hard way that pouring the two components onto foil and mixing with a popsicle stick was a bad idea. Not only did my application end up looking like footballs, but some were tacky footballs. Not wanting to recoat with even more epoxy, I put Permagloss over only the tacky guide wraps. A year later I decided to try to slice off some of the overloaded epoxy and recoat. This was like slicing off pieces of marshmallow, and the recoat was very uneven.

So... Time to strip off the guides and other wraps completely. I had built several rods I was very happy with so I wasn't worried about ruining the RPL. Many dull razor blades later the wraps were all removed, along with the finish in the area of the guides, along with the Sage silkscreen label. Using some creativity with my guide wraps I was able to hide any marring in the finish, and by wrapping a simple but long butt wrap I got the rod back in shape. Left the reel seat and grip intact, and finished the wraps with epoxy. The rod looks great again. The effort was time consuming, but I'm really glad to have and old friend available for use again.

Jeff Shafer

I always hated the guides put on with duct tape and then used during a hot summer. Or the stupidity of a broken rod that somebody had inserted a dowel or piece of coathanger wire into in the hopes of putting it back together.

Occasionally you find a nice surprise, however. A few years back a customer brought me an old Lew's SG rod that he wanted the handle extended and reel seat changed. He said that the handle and seat had already been replaced once but he now wanted something different. I had to remove the old stuff first, and when I started spiral cutting and chiseling off the reel seat I was very impressed at how well someone had fitted and mounted it. It was hard to remove but I had to admit that someone had done a first class job of putting that first or replacement seat on there.

When I got the job finished and the customer came in, I commented on how well the previous job had been done. He said, "You must not remember - you did that about 5 years ago."


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Copper wire and solder attaching 2 odd ball guides (he'd replaced two with ones that didn't match the rest of the rod). These were double foot guides and the wire had been wrapped around the feet and then spiralled past the ring onto the next foot. The solder job looked like a chicken had done it's duty and that was probably the good point-if he'd done a great solder job, he'd probably ruined the blank!!

Putter
Williston, ND

you guys are all to funny my worst rod came from e fellow retired guy who had an origianal st.croix from wqy back diffinatly older then me he asked if i could rebuild it at first glance i said yeah no problem after he left i cam to discover it had water inside how it got there is beyond me there was a repair once before that the epoxy just went away so i drained it repaired that then i got to the guides stripped em down and the guides wre imbeded into the rod blank i have never seen this before so i stretched the rod over to make sure it wouldent brake before i rebuilt it it stayed in contact how these guides did this to the rod is beyond me so i took epoxy and filled them in and sanded the rod down but that was my worst everything had to be done i ran into the guy recc. asked him how it was holdin up for him he said good its hangin above his fireplace he said it looked to nice to fish with and went and got a wal-mart rod lol