I'm primarily an ice rod builder - and as such, the vast majority of my builds have cork grips with no reel seat. I've been playing around with some reel seats for the folks that prefer a traditional reel seat on their ice rod. I use the Fuji TVS and AmTak G2 on my open water rod builds, and have prototyped an ice rod with a G2 seat. The problem I'm running into is that a size 16 foam arbor does not fit inside the carbon insert for either the G2 or TVS seats. The issue is that the diameter of the ice rod blanks I'm working with is 4-6mm. If I build a tape arbor to fit the blanks into the seat/carbon insert - the arbor is very tall/thick, and the surface contact area on the blank relative to the heigth of the arbor is very low. I'm just not confident that it's the best solution, even taking great care to make sure the arbors are fully encapsulated by Rod Bond. Other alternative is to put the arbor on the lathe and sand it down to the proper diameter. This is messy and not an ideal solution for building any volume of rods. Does anyone have any other thoughts or sources of a foam arbor that will fit either of these seats? It's honestly a bit surprising that neither manufacturer makes a foam arbor to fit them.

thanks for any ideas!

The SHIM/16/WG foam arbor we carry has an OD of 13mm which fits in most size 15mm OD carbon inserts

[voodoorods.com]

well, how did I miss seeing that arbor is available? OOF! - thank you!!