For those of you that are using this product, I contacted Solar today to ask about coverage of the West product. They told me that one quart of product of 207 will cover 200 to 250 linear feet of 1 in carbon sleeves. You should be able to figure out your cost of making these if you can figure out the cost of making 1 foot of foam cores.

Thanks. A 1 foot foam core a couple inches in diameter would only be pennies. Well, nickels, maybe.

All told, these are not only among the best grips you'd ever make, but also among the least expensive. The thing is that you have to stock up on some supplies before you start, so there is an initial investment that has to be made.

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Tom,
I am finally starting to see the cost savings. I would say I wasted most of my first batch of supplies messing with it and getting comfortable with a technique that I can reproduce the results I want. I will say one thing though...just because it costs less I wouldnt charge less. There are definately a few more steps involved in this than turning cork, and I think more room for things to go wrong.

Scott Sheets
www.smsrods.com

I'd agree completely - if the grip is better or offers your customers something better or more than they are getting on other rods, there is no reason to charge them less. And... we do have to consider our time in making these. Good point.

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You are right about Jon Soller being very helpful. I am doing my first grips, what I was trying to do is a split grip with 2 small cores and a single sleeve. I used the 1.1 inch shrink tubing I was just barely able to slide it over the cores, it ended up that the tubing wouldn’t shrink down enough in the middle section to compress the sleeve that was directly on the blank. The areas of the foam cores looked fabulous, but the areas in between not so great. I emailed Soller about higher shrink ratio tubing and got into a dialog with Jon. He said that they sell the shrink tubing at near cost, since they are interested in selling composites not heat shrink tubing, 3:1 shrink ratio tubing would be much more expensive. For what I am trying to do he said that I could buy 3:1 shrink rate tubing and apply the release agent myself, I just have to make sure that I get complete coverage or it could end up a disaster. Laminating directly on the blank leaves little room for mistakes.

Mike;
I have done what you are attempting to do, and it can get quite complicated. You may want to do some other handles first so that you get a little more comfortable working with the stuff then come back to your original design attempt, after you have a bit more experience