I’m working on a casting rod for panfish for a customer. The knowns as of yet are the blank which I have from North Fork and the grips which are 5 1/2in long straight rear grip made from long leaf pine bark. It was my first try on the bark grips and they look great thanks to the help from the board here. I’m aiming for a dark grip, unfinished blank, a black thread and very modest pops of color with trim bands here and there with titanium recoil guides. A couple questions I have are on reel seats and trim accent parts. First any suggestions on reel seats for this build. I’m a hard lean towards a 1 piece seat right now with the exception of thoughts of a 2 piece seat with the pine covering the blank between the seat. The Second thing is I really like the look of a thin flat all metal butt cap fighting butt and the ability to have a simple engraving there. Really any sporty, original, classy, ideas that may can be produced to even a source for something that’s premade. From seats to guides or any other part of the build feel free to comment with ideas and even corrections I’m just rolling things around and need help making my mind up! Thanks

Did you make the pine bark rings?

Yes took the bark from a tree, dried them down, cut plugs with hole sole on drill press. Glued them together and sand them down. It went really well just a lot of dust and a lot of waste as in it took a lot more bark than I expected to get quality rings that I could glue up.

The only real challenge I ran into with the bark grips was getting the face or glueing surface square so that the ring was the same thickness all the way around. Since it was my first attempt I only eyeballed this and without a micrometer you wouldn’t notice the difference. I did however end up with each individual ring (about 30 in total) varying in thickness from one to another. The reason being is some rings after boring would have maybe an 1/8in of usable surface other rings maybe had 3/4in and everywhere in between. So I took the thickest rings and cut them into and made two rings. I then grouped the rings with others coincidently there same thickness. I ended up with 5 groups of 6 or so rings each. I then glued them up taking one ring from each pile thinner to thickest and then back to thin to keep some sort of pattern and my sanity. I will be doing other bark grips and will come up with a user friendly way to get perfect in thickness rings before the next build.