I built a fly rod for tarpon in the early 80s from a St. Croix blank, and I'm pretty sure that most or all of the components were Pac Bay components, including an aluminum reel seat. Aside from the faded coloring on the wraps on the sun exposed side of the rod, it looks as good today as it did the day I finished it. However, I've built a bunch of fly rods for both fresh and salt water over the years as well as numerous spinning rods, and have used Fuji graphite spinning reel seats for many if not most of them. I only build rods for myself, and fancy is meaningless to me. I just want the components to do their job , do it well, and do it for a long time. Those graphite reel seats have never let me down yet.

To date, I have always butted the ends of the reel seats up against the grips, usually cork, and of course functionally they have performed just fine. The notion of recessing the hood of a reel seat into the end of the grip on a fly rod I assume is a purely cosmetic endeavor, and for that reason it never made a difference to me one way or the other. In fact, I always questioned the logic of reaming out the end of a cork grip such that the amount of cork left to surround the hood seemed dangerously weak and prone to early destruction from repeated use/abuse. I don't know how true this is, but that's the way I have suspected it could be. Oddly, I discovered something a few days ago that surprised me.

Also about the mid eighties, I purchased a 9wt fly rod from an outfit known as The Surfcaster in Norwalk, Ct for an uncle of mine that I was trying to get interested in fly fishing. They used to build their own rods. Unfortunately, he essentially never took the rod out of the tube, and I ended up inheriting the rod back after his passing about fourteen years ago. When I spotted the rod tube recently, I decided to take a look as I really didn't remember anything about it. I took it to the park for some casting practice, and I discovered that it had a Fuji graphite reel seat! The seat is marked as FPS-D16. It looks just like a DPS seat, and it appears that Fuji no longer has any such thing as an FPS model. I'm not at all sure what the difference between the two may have been. In any case, the seat was mounted for an up-locking position, and the hood of the seat is in fact recessed into the end of the cork grip! And it looks really nice!

The only cork grips I see marketed with recesses are simply round. They also often have decimal numbers describing the recess, which I am assuming are thousandths of an inch, and refer to the diameter of the cut. Is that so? If so, unless the grip and reel seats are marketed as a pair for each other, how does one match up a reel seat with the recess of a grip that is not an exact fit? And what about the depths of the recesses? Are they also all over the board? Because I see different diameters in different grips, I am assuming that there is no standardization here. Of course, it also appears that the round recesses are only designed for reel seats with round hoods. But what about reel seats with hoods like the Fuji DPS models...with beveled hoods? Yes, I know that the DPS models are marketed for spinning rods, but there are a host of fly rod seats with similar design. How does one contour the end of a cork grip to accept one of these...or are there grips that are already contoured for that purpose?