Anybody know of any tutorials on making your own blanks? I've got some interest and a business partner to possibly help fund this ambition but don't know the first place to start.

Dave your E-Mail address is hidden..



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/10/2006 02:37PM by Jim Upton.

Let's hope your business partner has some very, very, very deep pockets. You can get into many hundreds of thousands of dollars very quickly in terms of the machinery used in making blanks.

Aside from the machinery, much which has to be custom made for the purpose of manufacturing blanks, there will be a pretty steep learning curve on the ins and outs of materials and various design concepts with regard to making carbon fiber tubing.

............

There are a number of varing processes and requirments along with some expensive specialized machines, and some suprisingly simple fixtures. You need cooler to keep the varing grades of graphite on a roll cold. A rather large flag cutting talble to cut out each flag which will be lightly glued to, then rolled, under high pressure around a lubed tapered steel mandrel specific to one rod style. Once rolled the madrel with graphite is wraped with clear tape that can withstand heat. The blanks are heated in an oven, cooled, then unwrapped if a gloss or matte fin, or possably dunk painted in a long sub floor tube of paint and left to drip excess off, then heated again to bake on the paint. Then both ends are trimed to length. Multi-piece rods have to be fitted at the ferrule, labels printed spined and packaged. Thats just for blanks

Tom,

Isn't there some way of making them on a small scale with less machinery? I'm thinking that the method Mark Steffen must use has to be less cost prohibitive but perhaps even more dependent on years of experience and trial and error. His blanks are real nice and straight and durable and beautiful and I think he has very little machinery. Just wondering how a non-millionaire could try his hand at rolling a blank. I would think if you had a mandrel made by a machinist, ordered the right fabric, rolled it by hand, cooked it at the right temperature and duration in a make-shift oven (like cane makers use), and painted it like Mark paints his (squeegee method), you could get good results (after much trial and error and numerous failures).

Steve

What you talkin' bout - - -make shift ovens (like the cane makers use) ???????????? I would put money on the point that my oven will be closer to the temp I set it at than the one you use at home !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I do know of some that make nodeless rods that bake their cane in toaster ovens... But I can put a 6 foot piece of boo into my oven, take it to 500º (if I wanted to) and it will be 500º, not 478º, likewise at 350º it is 350º when measured with a good calibrated thermometer. Probably why our boo blanks are more precise in measurments than that of the Carbon fiber variety blank.

<*)))><

Steve, Dave
Jimmy Green (Fenwick, Sage, Winston) used to make blanks in his garage after he retired from Sage. I have some pictures he gave me of him doing this very thing before he passed away a few years ago. He, as he used to say, had some "Mickey Mouse" machinery that he made blanks on. Kerry Burkheimer used to do this by hand, and even CTS when they first started out did a bit of hand rolling prior to obtaining rolling tables. If you're willing to go through the tremendous learning curve you can actually roll blanks yourself by hand with a hand operated platen, apply the heat shrink cello-tape, then bake them in a makeshift oven. The big hurdle is not really getting the carbon on the mandrel, it is obtaining mandrels...they are very expensive, and only a few places make them....Lynco (spelling?) out in California comes to mind...there is another place overseas as well that I can't recall the name of at the moment. And even if you can get mandrels, you have to know what you're looking for. Besides the price of Carbon Fiber has risen so much in the past 18 months, you'd be hard pressed to not have to invest a lot of money in the pre-preg alone.
Of course you could nix all this, go borrow a quarter mil from the bank, call Century Designs and have them hook you up with all the machinery, and have them teach you how to do it....even then there is as Tom states a steep learning curve. It's pretty common in the blank making business to practice and produce a lot of waste for many weeks before you actually get one that is straight, doesn't break, has the right action, and looks good.


Andy Dear
Lamar Fishing

This is one reason why guys who really want to play with various tapers and whatnot end up making bamboo rods - the machinery is far less expensive and the expertise is far easier to come by. But even then it requires a commitment to learning and gaining experience.


................

Art,
It's pretty easy to build a "make-shift" oven that's suficient in size, heats accurately and doesn't cost an arm and a leg...that's all I meant.

I think it was Todd Vivian (maybe Kerry Burkheimer...don't remember) that told me he knew a guy that used to roll his own blanks, and bake them in his fireplace....seriously.


Andy Dear
Lamar Fishing Products

Art, I'm sure your oven is accurate and by "make-shift" I only meant homemade. I think many homemade items are superior to store bought, such as our fishing rods and most food. Thanks for the education, Andy, I would not have guessed that the madrel or the cloth were particularly expensive. The fireplace baking could lead to some great advertising: "Our blanks are hickory smoked 'til perfection and when you open your rod case, you'll want to go directly to your nearest barbeque joint."

Steve...that's exactly what I thought...BBQ Blanks.

Yeah, Carbon Fiber has seen massive jumps in price in the last 18 months for a number of reasons. I know Stephen at CTS had something like 2 or 3 price adjusts in the last year, and several other factories told me the same thing. One small manf. I know of couldn't get carbon for almost 3 months, because it was in such short supply except for the companies who could afford to buy huge quantities.
As a side note, I actually tried to buy a set of used mandrels from a major manf. for a now discontinued series of flyrods....they wanted like 12k just to start negotiating for about 15 mandrels that were 10 years old...and these suckers were used...well used! I was going to have CTS manf. blanks to my specs. on my mandrels, with some updated materials, but that required a much larger bank roll than I am used to carrying!


Andy Dear
Lamar Fishing

Lots of great info here. Thanks guys!

It did get me wondering more about something I've kicked around in the back of my head now and then though. How feasible/affordable do you all think it would it be for an average joe to make a fair fiberglass blank? Not high end stuff obviously, but a wally-world comparable stick, just for the fun of it.

Great question Mick, and I would love to hear the answer too. I wonder if you could use an inexpensive graphite blank as a mandrel if you treated it first with some type of wax or releasing agent. Then, you could buy fiberglass cloth, wrap it on the mandrel, and cure it with some sort of resin that you would paint on (like you do for repairing boats or cars), rather than a resin that was integral with the cloth and required heat curing (which I think is how pre-preg works).

I'm just thinking out loud with minimal knowledge (one of my specialties). I would love to try it, even if I ended up with the world's butt-ugliest but still fishable rod, LOL. You could always do some sanding and painting to get it to look nice or leave it in it's raw and ugly form to reveal exactly how it was made. I think some artisans/craftsmen call these "artifacts of process", such as marks left by hand tools on the dovetail joints of a $100,000 piece of antique cabinetry. I would call mine "artifacts of reinventing the $5 fishing pole" and fish it with pride.

I think glass blanks are still heated and cured in an oven. The type of glass resin used to make boats and stuff would only make a very heavy and not very flexible fishing rod. I've played with some boat building and that's not quite the same thing used to make fiberglass fishing rods I don't think.

Okay, I'm back and still thinking out loud with minimal knowledge. Some fiberglass pre-preg such as S-glass is available on the web for not much money. Maybe you could cut it, tack it to the mandrel with a cool iron, roll it, wrap it with heat-shrink celophane tape, and cure it at the low end of the curing temperature range, thus still being able to use a small-diameter graphite blank as your mandrel without destroying the mandrel for future use. You could use cheap cosmetic blems as the mandrels with the finish sanded down to bare graphite. If you use a 2 or 3-piece blank for your mandrels, you might be able to use your home oven for the curing. It's got to be more contollable than the fireplace method Andy alluded to! A suitable release agent for applying to the mandrel and a source of the heat-shrink celo tape are all you would need to conduct some simple and not very expensive experiments. Worst case (assuming the fumes from curing don't kill you and your family - might want to check that out first, LOL), you would be out less than $100 in wasted materials.

I think if you look at the Steffen bros site they show some pics of them making blanks. There has been a resurgence of fibreglass in the last few years.

[www.madehow.com] This article describes a blank making process, as well as some history of rod making - I have no clue as to its accuracy or completeness. Thought you might enjoy nonetheless.

Great link on the process,
Thanks Steve.

It seems to me that the hard part is designing the taper. I make bamboo rods and I know enough about tapers to know which ones I like and which ones probably won't suit me, plus, tapers are pretty much a constant subject of discussion amongst bamboo rodmakers, yet I have never seen any discussion about graphite or fiberglass rod tapers on any of the rodmaking boards I visit. You guys have 2 tapers to take into acount, the mandrel is only part of the story, what and how much you roll on it will determine the final product, along with type and weave of the cloth, the formula of the resin and temperature and time used to cure it. just a thought
john