Making a split-grip casting rod without a foregrip. After measuring with the reel on, I have cut the threaded barrel off of my reel seat even with the front nut. What with, or how do you fill the gap on the front of the seat between the blank and seat? Fill and level off with epoxy? Use a large rubber winding check? (It's quite a gap there!)Thanks for any suggestions, always appreciated! Mike

I usually put a graphite arbor there and seal it with rodbond (you could also try tinting the rodbond black and putting that over the surface of the opening). On my spinning rods, I use a downlocking reel seat position and use just a very small cork foregrip turned down small enough that the nut will slip over it.

I filled the reel seat with epoxy and then used a winding check to dress off the front. I really like being able to rest my index finder directly on the rod blank.

rhr

When your done finishing your wraps you can just dump the excess down the next rod's reelseat gap. I do it on foregrip rods also. I than hang it straight to keep the epoxy level. sometimes I don't need a winding check as the reelseat nut finshes off the rod on some of the larger diameter blanks.

I like to build a ramp up from the blang to the reelseat with 5 min epoxy and wrap right up to the seat. With the rod turning, I just put the epoxy right at the juncture of the rod and seat until it flows into a gradual slope (you might want to raise the tip end up a little to get the slope you prefer) You can also take a small thin piece of cork, EVA, wood turned to the dia of the threads and use it like a winding check to match the grip.

Mike

[www.rodbuilding.org]

Second time in 5 minutes I posted this - Fuji makes colored winding checks which butt up to teh edge of a size 16 seat perfectly.

Nice, Billy. I was so busy admiring the rod, I didn' even notice the check!!!

Mike

I ordered that particular check from Japan, although I know a few places now stock them in the US. I ordered a bunch of other aluminum "trinkets" - if you look on teh FUji Japan site you'll see what is available. Biggest problem is getting everythingsized properly. Some of the stuff looks lik e it will workgreat...until you get it and the OD is too small for what you want to do, or too big for teh wwvoen tubing ends that I wanted to use. Teh winding check turned out to be a PERFECT fit for the 16 reel seat. That one in the pic was a size 9mm, I also have an 11.5, I think.

To make life a bit easier, (and much probably better looking) I ordered an exposed (ecsm) seat to fit the blank snugly, and leave less of a gap (if any) in front. Should be easy to fit a winding check, if necessary. The seat I tried in the first post is a straight size 18 that looks just plain chunky, even when cut down a bit. The resulting gap in front looked awful, I was going to resort to using a small dia. cork ring turned down to cover it up, but that pretty much nulifies the reason for the exposed blank there in the first place.
Thanks for the help, much appreciated! I learn something new every day here and hope I can return the favor one day. Mike