I recently agreed to repair and rebuild a custom Sage RPL 9', 5# that was lost in a local river and recovered a mile downstream two months later. I don't usually work on such projects but curiosity mixed with a fair amount ignorance or plain stupidity overcame what better judgement I had available.

The tip of this two piece rod is built with snake guides and should need no work other than cleanup. The butt section however has to have both double foot ceramic guides as well as the hook keeper removed and reset as water got under the wrap epoxy. It appears that on the guides the tunnels may not have been filled. The reel seat may be salvaged and left intact it appears but the cork in the grip has partially disintigrated and a new grip is necessary.

The most time consuming part of the refurbish is the cleanup. A mild detergent took off the mud and grime but left hundreds of tiny spots that appear to be lime or calcium deposits. So far my most effective cure is to wipe the rod with CLR which removes some small deposits and softens the larger ones enough to be scraped away with a thumbnail. At the rate thumbnails grow back I'll be a while longer at this part of the work.
Fortunately for me the builder had used masking tape to shim the grip so there is only about two inches of glue to remove fom the rod at the butt of the grip. The tape was still sticky on the rod but no glue had penetrated it from the cork.

This has been an interesting endeavor from a learning standpoint but I am certainly open to suggestions with regard to cleaning mineral deposits and glue removal from the rod. I'll probably stick to building rods rather than refurbishing in the future.

Stan Grace

Stan Grace
Helena, MT
"Our best is none too good"

An equal mixture of white vinegar and water might work to remove the mineral deposits. This mixture normally works great on removing calcium deposits if the build up is soaked in the solution for awhile.

- Sam

Sam

I'll try your suggestion on the butt section where the guides have been removed. I'm nervous about leaving the tip section in a solution that might creep under the wraps as they are still in good condition. If it completes the mineral removal on the butt section I'll be half way home.

Thanks, Stan

Stan Grace
Helena, MT
"Our best is none too good"

Stan,
Oddly enough, I rebuilt my 9' 5wt RPL this past Spring. Removing the guides was quite a chore. When I built the rod many years ago I coated my threads with Crystal Coat which forms a solid wrap. But because the Crystal Coat applications hadn't built up sufficiently to not have thread ridges, a few years ago I added a coating of epoxy, which wasn't mixed properly. That led to a tacky finish and another coat of epoxy, way too much epoxy and I ended up with footballs. This gets better. I decided a year or so later to try to carve off some of the epoxy and recoat. And to top things off, I used epoxy on some wraps and Permagloss on others. Adding epoxy over poorly carved epoxy wraps looked even worse than when I started.

To do the rebuild I removed the guides and scraped with everything imaginable (no hair dryer and thumb nail for this conglomerate), removing what appeared to be a top coating on the rod blank. The areas that I scraped were a different color than the original blank surface. So even though my snake guides were a bit grooved, I reinstalled them so that they'd lay over the same areas where I scraped the rod. A couple of turns of thread inside of each snake covered some marring.

So be careful how hard you scrape the finish, you may remove some in the process.

Jeff

The guide epoxy came off with a thumbnail only but the mineral build up is the major chore, Fortunately the grip was poorly glued. The two inch butt section was the only place the glue was attached to the blank and the grip. This short section had not been prepared properly for glueing as the blank was bright and slick under a thick glue build up and the hardened glue chipped off in chunks leaving the blank looking like new. A proper scuffing with a 3M pad would made my job tougher I'm sure.

Stan Grace
Helena, MT
"Our best is none too good"