Hello everyone. A friend of mine has asked me to repair some salmon mooching rods. They are two piece gloomis, heavy power, moderate action 10'6" rods. The top sections are OK, but the bottom sections have pretty big chunks of paint missing. He wants me to put a clear coat over the entire bottom section of the rod as they are, missing paint and all. I am very concerned that without decent prep, they are going to look terrible, and worse yet, the clear coat will not stick. I am not too enthused about stripping the paint off of them as that process would be new to me and it seems like it would be a lot of work.

This leads to several questions. 1. Have any of you tried putting a clear coat over a surface that includes both paint and naked graphite? If so, how did it work out? 2. How nasty a job is it to strip the paint off? If it was just one rod, I would not be too concerned, but he has 12 of them that are in the same condition and if it is a big job, I don't know that I want to tackle it. Thanks much

Hi Bob
I agree that the rod will look terrible Particularly on a decent Loomis blank. I have the same rod on my lathe at the moment.
I used the following process to strip and recoat the blank
1)Used a stanley blade(craft knive) to remove the damaged paint Make sure to keep the blade at 90 deg to the blank and then use a scrapping motion to get rid of the old coating.Scrape only small amounts at a time.I have been using this method for many years and find that with graphite blanks there will be no damage to the surface.This should take about 45 minutes.(don`t get lazy and angle the blade this will surely damage the graphite)
2)a light wetsand with 400grit wd paper
3)Mask,prep and clear coat 3 coats @ 75 microns(I use a small hvlp touch up gun)
4)for additional quality I will sometimes apply a 4th coat then wetsand after curing with 1200 grit wp and the polish the blank with finishing cream
As there are 12 rods to do this process will save you at least half of the time it takes to ``touch up`` the rods
Regards and many happy`s for the season

Just one note to add to Rob's comment.

I do a similar procedure to what Rob uses. However, when I scrape the blank to remove finish or paint, I scrape only from the butt to the tip.

The graphite fibers run from the butt to the tip of the rod. If you scrape only from the butt to the tip, you don't run the risk of catching a graphite fiber with the blade, and peeling it up and off of the rod.

Good luck

Thanks guys. I will give it a go and hope for the best.