First post on my new account that I made for the rod building app! (I forgot my password)

Anyone have any notorious screw ups you’re willing to share that you’ve experienced during your rod building endeavors?

I just fatally ruined a blank out of pure negligence on my part and am looking for someone to make me feel somewhat better about myself haha!

I've had a couple over my span as a rodbuilder. Small stuff like not mixing my epoxy long enough and it didn't cure, wrapped a couple guides too tight and cracked the blank under them. I finished a rod one time then realized that I forgot to put the nut and forward seat onto the reelseat before I assembled it all. Just last week I did this; I had been experimenting with an 8' heavy action 2 piece rod that I built with a home made ferrule system just in front of the foregrip. It was built tough but I just couldn't get the slip fit right so I decided to just use Rod Bond and make it a 1 piece rod. As it was setting up, I went to work. About halfway thru my midnight shift I thought I should have used an outer sleeve over the joint as it might be stronger and would hide my poor excuse of a ferrule system. When I woke up the next afternoon, I boiled some water and slowly poured it over the joint and then slowly tried to twist it apart. I felt it move but then seen a twist mark in the blank just beyond where I thought the inner ferrule sat. I stopped but too late, the blank was ruined. I'm just grateful to have all the knowledge and experience right here to fall back on and allot of times they can help you overcome a mistake.

Steve

Many years ago I installed some grips on some offshore trolling rods but forgot to put the uni-butt ferrule locking nut back on the ferrule before I installed the grips. That's a mistake you only make once.


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Top two mess ups:

1. Needed to shorten the butt section of a 4 sections rod for a permanently affixed fighting butt so that all sections would be the same length when the rod was disassembled. Cut exactly the correct length off the mid-butt section.

2. Epoxied a pricey, nickel silver reel seat to an extremely pricey bamboo blank - backwards. Most fortunately I was able to remove the reel seat without damaging the blank. It did not end so well for the reel seat or my ego.

I learned from making mistakes of putting profit above quality using foreign blanks with higher breakage percentage, and it came back to bite me in my backside; and wound up costing me double labor or more. So from then on I changed to more quality over profits and have not looked back since.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 07/19/2022 09:57PM by Kent Griffith.

I used a white china marker to mark the location of all the guides. After applying epoxy to the thread, the thread became transparent and the location marks were there in all their glory. Unfortunately, I didn't notice this until the epoxy had cured.

Congratulations on making a mistake! Welcome to the club!

My qualifications include, but are not exclusive to the following:

1.) Cracked ferrule with too much thread tension. (Probably not the best thing to do, but I wrapped the whole ferrule, not just a quarter-inch, and finished as normal. It still works fine today.)
2.) Forgot to add winding check or locking nut before wrapping guides. (I cut a nylon check and fit it on. I didn't know about epoxy ramps then. Lock nut: I had to remove the guides the nut would not slide over and re-do them.)
3.) Epoxy on guides sagged when I forgot to turn on drier motor. (Sanded the bumps out and re-coated.)
4.) Put wrong decal on rod and tip-top facing the wrong way. (Scraped decal off carefully and used a paint pen to write info on blank. I think you can request a new decal from some companies for their blanks.)
5.) Left a small gap between foregrip and reel seat. (It was not a rod that I liked anyway, so I just moved on. However, it did inspire me to build a rod clamp from Rod Maker Mag!)

All these issues were easy enough to fix, and it challenged me to be creative, and practice a double/triple check with dry fitting. With a complex build, I will even write down a list of steps first. So, a blessing in the end!

Mistakes upped my game! And I reserve the right to keep making them as needed...