Hey guys, having only built a couple of bass rods for personal use
and only used premade moulded eva, im at the point where i want to try shaping my own eva grips.
Trouble being i want to put a foregrip on the fuji kskts casting seat with the kdps style front.
Has anybody bored out eva with a spade bit or similar (20mm or close to that i believe) wats the best/easiest way to do this??
Cheers.. Josh

spade won't work, you need to but a 3/4" ID EVA grip and ream it with a power reamer. If you want to go the bit route how will you keep the hole centered? Finding a brad poont bit larger than 1/2" is difficult, but you can use a Forstner or an Irwin Speedbore. YOu need to bore the grip to fit on the KDPS seat first, then you need a seperate piece which will fit slightly snug on the blank - and then glue them together on the actual rod. If you do not you'll end up with a hole too large and won't fit the blank, an off center hole. I think if you use a Forstner bit and stop it at a certain point (before it goes all the way threough, you can get that to work. YOu need 2 different size holes on the same grip when using the KDPS

Thanks for the advice, yeah i understand the smaller i.d needed to fit to blank size at the front of the grip. I have found the flexcoat borer spade bits and mite try to fashion something like this on a normal spade bit, with a piece of round metal material/ tube that is the same size as the i.d of the eva and hope that the point of the spade bit can follow this in to the eva while drilling. Anybody used these borer spade bits?

I do not know how those work on EVA, I never tried. I know a regular Spade bit used teh way it was intended bounced all over teh place in EVA.

The reverse spade bits from Flex Coat (they center in the bore and cut from the opposite side) will work fairly well on EVA. Not as well as they do on cork, of course, as EVA will tend to stretch and move. So you move up a size or two and end up with the desired bore size, which will be a little smaller than the bit used.

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

Josh,
Any time that I do boring, in any kind of grip material; I use a tapered circular files in a power drill running backwards.

I have many different sized circular files and it is easy to use these files to enlarge the bore of grips to the correct size. By running the drill backwards, the file does not catch in the grip material. Simply hold the grip in one hand and use the appropriate sized file to enlarge the hole as needed. If you need to enlarge it more; then go to the next larger sized file.

The advantage of using the file is that you buy one set of files and never have to buy another set, never have to sharpen the files and never have to replace the files. They just simply continue to work.

I cut off the triangular handle and either chuck the file into the drill, or if too large, turn the end of the file down using a grinder to reduce the size of the file to the size needed to fit into the drill being used. I find that it is much easier to use a hand drill rather than a drill press.l With a variable speed, one can start the file at 0 rpm, and gradually speed up the drill as needed to get up to cutting rpm.

I always wear a cloth glove on the hand holding the grip. As I do the reaming with the file, I let the grip slip a bit from time to time rotating the grip slowly. This slow rotation, keeps the hole centered as one reams out the inner hole.

Generally a reaming job takes a few seconds and then move on to the next job.

Be safe

Josh,

Try a 3/4" hole saw available at your local hardware store...works great.

Don Campbell
don@sensorfishingrods.com

Use a 3/4 inch i.d. grip, and cut it to the length you need. Drill and ream a cap from either a solid disc, or a slice from a smaller grip to close it off. Glue the two together with contact cement.