Hey everyone. I'm going to be restoring a vintage Granger bamboo fly rod and will he redoing all the wraps. I have ordered and recieved the silk but my question is on the color preserver. I do have flex coat color preserver but I have never used it on silk before. I have seen alot of talk about a product called Al's Color Rite. Never used that either. Guess I'm kinda stuck on what to use as I want it to look original. Thanks everyone for the advice!

Al's (It works OK.) is supposedly formulated specifically for silk while Flex Coat is probably more of a nylon thread CP (Never used it.).

I refurbished - not restored, refurbished - a Granger Champion last summer. Send.an e-mail an I'll let you know the CP I used and where it can be purchased.

Granger originally used lacquer as a cp.
Al’s works good but takes 4 coats
If you can find it in some old hobby shop. Aerogloss Dope in clear gloss is the best. Use it outside as this stuff is like sniffing glue.
Other options are Delf clear brushing lacquer.

Don: Your "refurbished" statement is well taken. Glass and graphite rods are 100% synthetic and do not degrade much over time. Bamboo rods are 100% organic, and like all organic things they suffer irreparable degradation over time. You can refurbish a bamboo rod to look like new, but you cannot restore it to function/cast like new. You will break it.

Very interesting stuff Phil , wasn't aware Bamboo rods suffer from irreparable degradation over time and one should not expect that restoring one will bring back it's performance level to when it was relatively new , learned something .

Well this is where I have to disagree with Phil.
Fiberglass and other composites degrade over time especially when exposed to environmental factors such as UV.
I restored,yes I said restored, hundreds of bamboo fly rods to original condition.
Unless the rod was not taken care of i.e left in the bottom of a wet boat. I’ve never seen major degradation.
On the other hand I’ve seen some pretty nasty fiberglass rods that were only a few years old.

But we digress. Since that wasn’t the OP’ s question

Most vintage cane fly rods were constructed with hide glue. Hide glue is "completely water soluble and biodegradable". This is not true of modern, polymer glues. The claims "authentic restoration" and "completely refurbished" are not synonyms.

All rods suffer fatigue over time. You can only flex something (incur so many "cycles") before the material and subsequent structure weakens. Carbon is very good in terms of being able to withstand far more "cycles" than glass and similar composite materials. Of course, the adhesives used to bind the materials, and in the case of bamboo, the adhesive binding the segments, will also fatigue. With bamboo, most failures occur when the adhesive lets go and the segments delaminate, leading to a structural failure which then causes breakage of one of more segments. On the other hand, rods that have been well cared for, even bamboo, can still be fished hard many, many decades later.

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Is there any way to restore a vintage silk fly line? A restored classic fly rod begs to be paired with a classic fly line.

There are all kinds of instructions online on how to “refurbish” a silk fly line. the first step is to find a tapered line in the correct size that hasn’t degraded.