I'm working on a light spinning rod for crappies and panfish- using a 6' rainforest blank and an American Tackle Green Matrix reelseat. The reel seat is 4" total in length. I plan to use a small ultralight reel and considered shortening the reel seat about a 1/2" to make it more compact and remove some of the excess length off the threaded end. I'm not sure if this will be worth doing. Has anyone attempted to do this before? I would have to cut through the threaded graphite and graphite insert that runs through it. Not sure if this can be done without ruining the reel seat.

I do it on all my regular Fuji seats, no problem, except if I go to switch reels and find what fits one reel, may not always fit another. A prime example is Neweel reels with short as possible feet, and Penns with monster feet.

I wrap a few turns of masking tape around the seat giving me a straightedge to work with. I cut with a fine Exacto saw with 32TPI, or something along those lines. I cleanm it up and make sure everything is squared up with a disk sander. If using cork, I find it imperative to get teh end perfectly straight (I'm anal), with foam, it doens't matter as the foam can compress and make up teh space if teh end of the seat isn't square. I get the end of teh seat square in either case though.

I've also had good luck cutting regular nylon/graphite reel seats. I use a power miter saw with a fine tooth blade. I think with the matrix insert you would need to use a cutting disk for the cleanest and straightest cut.

Billy's method is a good one. And I'll offer this, if you have a stationairy disk sander, you can just put the seat against the miter and feed it into the sanding disk until you have the length you want. An 80 to 100 grit disk will eat that nylon away quickly. I've stopped cutting mine and just "sand" them to length. Of course, if you're going to take off more than maybe 38th inch or so, you may want to just cut it and then square it on the disk to save a little time. But for about 3/8ths or less, I just sand them away. Takes only seconds.

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Thanks for all the great advice! Unfortunately I don't have a stationary sander, so I think I'll try to cut and then sand by hand.

Before I had a starionary sander, I bought a "chuckable" disk sander & stuk it into my lathe. HAd to be careful, but I stil got very good results getting a square edge. I think Norton makes one which is hard rubber & is sold in Home Depot