Good afternoon, my name is John and I'm fairly new to rod building I've done 3 rods so far and now I'm hooked.

I recently purchased a NFC soft touch 14" rear grip for use on a batson 9ft 6in 10-20lb salmon trolling rod. I see the grip has an arbor on the reel seat side of it but not on the butt end of it, I can't find any info on if I need an arbor for the butt section and maybe for the thinner "grip" portion of it as well. It doesn't look like the carbon fiber shell is thick enough to be very strong but maybe I'm underestimating its strength.

Has anyone used these grips and if so do you arbor anything other than the reel seat side?

Thanks

John,

You WILL need an arbor to glue to the blank and grip at the butt end. How you do this may vary, however, you need to support the seat at the front and butt end. Did your rear grip come with a butt cap that has a tenon?? Leaving the seat hollow between points is fine - carbon tubes are super strong.

I'm thinking back to when I installed the 9-inch+/- soft touch rear grip on a rod. I think the butt did not have a pre-installed arbor because the EVA butt cap that came with the grip had a tenon that functioned as an arbor for the butt area.

Look again, there is a second arbor on the back end of the reel seat, it's made out of EVA, the butt cap. All the tube rear grips out there are thin walled, still as heavy walled as many of the rod blanks they support, and larger diameter which makes them much stiffer. All my boat rods get 3 spaced out arbors in the center no matter what kind of tubing used. All the rod holders I have used for many years now go around the reel and seat for the most part, very little touches either of the grips. All my foregrips are at least 4ish inches and up to 6 inches to have a good full fist grip while removing the rod from the holder under a big hot fish. The longer the rod, the longer the grip in case I have to choke up on the rod to reach the fish with a net.

Thank you, it does have an eva butt cap, the butt cap doesn't fit tight on the blank though so I hadn't thought of that as supporting the rear of the grip, thanks again for the replies I'll probably end up using the butt cap and maybe a few tape arbors in the middle just for my own piece of mind lol

Norm Miller knows a lot about these grips, maybe he'll chime in.

I have not used the full length NFC soft touch grips, so don’t know a much about them. If the butt cap is like the butt caps on their split grip fighting butts, the hollow part of the butt cap can be shimmed to fit the blank. The outer diameter of the butt cap serves as an arbor for the rear end of the grip. It looks like the front part of the grip is arbored with polyurethane foam. If the rear half of the grip is hollow you can surely use tape or a polyurethane arbor to shim it to give extra support.
Norm

Whoops! I meant well. Lol

I've used the shorter version of the NFC full length soft touch grip.

Like people have mentioned the EVA butt cap has the tenon that serves as an arbor.

If you want something other than the EVA as the butt cap, I've used the American tackle G2 carbon handle butt cap, G2HBC.

I used the tenon part of the NFC EVA butt cap as the arbor. My blank fit without needing any tape or arbor to fit inside the EVA.
The tenon OD on the G2 is slightly larger than the ID of the NFC handle. I used a file to reduce the OD of the tenon to until it fit inside the handle. The OD of the G2 matches the OD of the soft touch handle.

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