Right now, one of the focuses of my rodbuilding is to become competent with feather inlays on flyrods. I've really been enjoying this part of rod building immensely. Here's my question:

I'm about to build a SCIII 8'6" 4wt. 2 pc., and I plan to put a cocobolo spacer in the reel seat, and wrap the guides with garnet thread (and maybe some trim, depending on the inlay). What types of feathers would match garnet with no CP? I'm open to any and all suggestions, however conservative or non-conservative.

I have found that the feathers do not have to "match" the threads in order to look good unless you are using a very definitive colored feather and alot of them. My favorite feathers to inlay are jungle cock, any small hackling feathers (hen saddle,neck), pheasant tips and tailings. I have found jungle cock looks good with everything I have done.

I agree with Elrod, jungle cock looks good with about anything. Pheasant feathers also make nice inlays. You can get many different colors of feathers from one skin. Just pull out a few feathers and start putting them together until you find something you like. The possibilites are endless. Check out the Golden Witch website over on the left. They have several examples of inlays.

Have you tried rust colored thread? I recently did a matte charcoal rod that had a cocobolo wood spacer for the reel seat and used Gudebrod 257 thread (rust). When hit with epoxy, it darkened to an almost exact match to the wood. Of course, wood color and brightness varies between pieces, but it might be worth the price of a spool of thread to experiment.

Of course, garnet makes a beautiful thread wrap, but I thought I'd toss this out just the same.

Bob

Thanks so much for the suggestions regarding the jungle cock and the rust colored thread. I'll definitely pick up some of each and play around with it.

Regarding the pheasant feathers, I recently did an inlay with some of the pheasant wing feathers (dark brown edges, tan just below that, with a black center) on an SCIV. I was using Gudebrod 396 brown with metallic gold and black trim lines, and WOW--did it turn out nicely! (At least for a novice like myself.) I'm anxious to play with the smaller darker brown (with a bit of a lavender sheen) feathers that have black edges.