Guys, some questions.....ordered the CFX grip making kit from Mudhole. Just finished shaping and gluing up some foregrips but still well into the learning curve. Rear grip comes next. First ques....once the grip is cured, what is the best way to cut it to length. I've thought about blue taping over the spot to cut and using my miter saw. Sounds like overkill but I figure that's my best way of getting an even cut. Second.....what is the best way to shape a tenon in an end so it fits inside a reel seat or a butt cap? I'm guessing that you can't put it on an mandrel and lathe and shape it up w/ 60 grit like you can with cork or EVA. Or can you?

Any thoughts or feedback would be appreciated. Thanks!!

I would cut an shape the foam core first, then sleeve it with the carbon.

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It might help to clarify what you mean when you say,"glueing up some foregrips." Do you mean you epoxied the skins on the foregrip? Did you not want tenons on your foregrips also? Or were those an afterthought? Are you going to extend the sleeves onto the tenons? If so,remember to allow for the extra space taken up by the sleeve when shaping it.

Sorry, Chuck I should have been more specific. I'm building grips for some bait casting rods. I've already built a couple of tapered foregrips using the CFX carbon fiber kits from Mudhole. Those were easy. No tenons required. Just follow the Mudhole video. Twist the ends. They're now cured up. I just trimmed off the excess and rough edges on the ends and butt up against the reel seat to one end or add winding check to other. However the full length rear grip requires some thought. Thanks for your reply Tom. The core, of course, can be easily shaped with a tenon. But when you add the skin over the epoxy, what do you do about the overhang of the skin on the tenon once you stretch it out and it sets. Or do you twist the end to cover the tenon and then let it set. That doesn't quite make sense to be yet since it will have to be turned down as well. I've seen pictures of some of the over-the-counter carbon grips and the tenons are clean and look like they're ready to fit flush right into the rear of the reel seat. The Mudhole guys said just build w/o a tenon and butt it up against the reel seat. Ok, that would work but I'm looking to do something a little visually pleasing if possible. This is my first go-round on these grips and I'm fortunate to have some room for a learning curve. But I must be missing something here.

Many thanks for the feedback.

Berk

The shrink tube will form the carbon sleeve down and over the tenon. This is why you want to allow for the thickness of the sleeve, X2, when turing the core.

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I've only made one grip so I am by no means an expert, but the one grip I did make turned out pretty darned good if I do say so myself. Personally I turned the tenon (s) while I was turning the grip, but you can definitely turn it afterwards if you want.


I did not have the carbon fiber cover the tenon in that it was actually epoxied to the tenon. What I did was pull and cinch the sleeve over the entire length of the grip. It leaves a gap between the OD of the grip, and the OD of the tenon. I was sure to measure the length of the tenon so once the grip was cured I knew where I needed to make my cut. I put the grip on a mandrel and chucked it up in my power wrapper (I upgraded my stock chuck to the Alps chuck) and used the edge of a file to cut the carbon fiber sleeve as it turned. It cuts pretty quickly and makes a nice clean cut. After I cut it it was easy to pull the piece off the end of the grip and it left me with a nice clean tenon. I will say I had a little seepage into the area of the shoulder of the tenon, but it was easily cleaned up with the file.

I did tenons at both ends of the grip. One to receive the butt cap, and one to receive the end of the reel seat. The toughest part for me was determining the OD I needed on the foam core, so that once the carbon sleeve was on, it would match the ODs of the trim rings I was using. I used a skin thickness of .050" as my number. My trim rings had an OD of 1.06" so I turned the foam core down to .906. The tenons were different ODs as the trim ring at the reel seat had a different ID than the trim ring at the butt cap, and the butt cap itself.

Hope what I said makes sense. Anyhow, below is a link to a pic of the grip I am describing.

[www.rodbuilding.org]

Yes it does David. Thank you very much.

And BTW, nice piece of work!!

Thanks for the nice compliment Larry, and I'm glad you were able to make sense out of what I wrote. I wasn't sure lol. I will say that I did one thing extra that the Mud Hole video doesn't show or do. After I turned my grip down, I top coated the foam core with some of the lay up epoxy and let it dry. After it dried I gave it a light sanding to knock down a couple of waves that I had in the surface of the epoxy. I had experimented with putting the sleeve on a non top coated piece of the foam core, and I didn't like that it wasn't easy to manipulate the sleeve.

Or I should say, as easy as it was to manipulate it on the top coated core that I ended up making into the grip in the picture. You can still see some slight waviness in the weave of the grip, but the epoxy was starting to set up and I didn't want to mess with it much more. I used to repair furniture as part of one of my previous jobs, and I learned then that the more you play with it, the worse it seems to come out. lol

Wow David talk about timing. What Mudhole doesn't say either is the difficulty one might have while trying to put the sleeve over a long piece of core. Yikes that was painful and I only got about half of it straight. It was ugly but valuable lessons were learned. I'd plan to use this as practice to do some cutting and shaping and hoped a grip would come out of it. It's curing up now. I have some thoughts that I added to yours and we'll see what happens. Thanks again and best of luck in all of your rod building and fishing endeavors.

Larry, this video and help from one of the members here, Phil Erickson are what I used as the basis for laying up the grip I made. It's a great video from a former sponsor. It's long but informative.

I really enjoyed making the grip I made. I'll probably do another one some time in the future. I have an idea for a spinning rod grip that may be pretty cool.


lol be a good idea if I posted the link to the video, huh? lol [www.youtube.com]


Tom, I hope it's ok to post this link. If not let me know. Thanks !



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/30/2019 07:55PM by David Baylor.

Great video David. Thanks!

David, a quick follow-up on this conversation on something I tried which is a variation to your technique above on handling/shaping tenons. I'm working on a carbon fiber straight rear grip that has the carbon sleeve on it already cured. I cut off one end, with the cured overhang on it, with a miter saw which left me with a nice clean square shouldered end. Then I took the point of a chisel, put the grip in the lathe, and cut into that end of the grip at some distance from the end, which would be equivalent to the desired length of the tenon. The cut would be only deep enough to pass thru the skin and penetrate the foam core. Then I took an exacto knife and cut out between the core and the carbon skin around the circumference of the cut that was just made on the end. With a little patience, the carbon skin came right off leaving me with an exposed piece of core. I could then shape the core to the desired OD to fit whatever I needed. No muss no fuss.


I hope this makes sense. I'm sure this has been tried before but it was a revelation for me. I have a couple more carbon grips that I'm going to tackle in a few days. Again I appreciate the input and look forward to comparing notes again. Best of luck in all of your endeavors.

Larry, what you wrote makes perfect sense and is exactly what I was talking about in my first post to this thread when I said that you can definitely turn the tenon afterwards, if you want.

I actually experimented doing with a stock CFX grip that I had over reamed. It was more or less like peeling a finished guide wrap off. Not that hard at all. As long as you're patient peeling it off it should present no problems. Get in a little cocky and rush it a bit and you run the risk of chunking the foam core.

Ask me how I know? lol