Anson, two pieices of advice that I found useful when I was wrapping my first couple of rods: - Be patient. If you're like me, you're practically foaming at the mouth to get your rod finished. You want to be able to fish with it, admire it, call in the press and pose for pictures with it. Fight that urge, and be patient. Most of my mistakes come when I'm trying to do things too fast. Being
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Matthew, I have had great success with blanks and components from Black Dog Tackle, a board sponsor. I've built an 8-weight and a 10-weight, both for saltwater, on Black Dog blanks, and have been thrilled with the results. I'm not the world's most experienced fly fisherman, so I don't have a whole lot of equipment experience to compare my Black Dog rods to, but I've been very, very happy with my
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Wylie, I am both a rodbuilder and have what is commonly called red-green colorblindness. To be perfectly honest, I would recommend building the rod exactly the way you normally would. Do not take the color blindness into consideration at all. True color-blindness, seeing things as though they were a black and white movie, is very, very rare. What most people have, and what I have, are what is
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Bud, a very similar thing happened to me - I lost about an inch off the top of the first fly rod I ever built. I almost cried when I realized what happened. But Tom is right: just put the top back on, adjust the guides if necessary, and forget it ever happened. I never even noticed the "missing inch" on that fly rod, and I suspect your experience will be the same. Look at it this wa
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And I thought, when I used 10 on the first fly rod I built, that I was using too many.... 16 does sound like an awful lot. I tend to agree with Tom, that you want to use as few guides as is possible to get the job done. When I build a rod, I have a general idea of how many guides I'm going to need, and straying from that causes me to think hard before I commit to the final number. When I built
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For whatever my opinion is worth, I think that underwraps are useful on heavier rods that are going to be handled roughly. I build mostly surf rods, and when you add up the weight of the blank, guides, grips, reel seat, reel, etc., I can't see how whatever extra weight 8 or 10 underwraps will add is going to diminish performance in any way. On lighter rods, I can see the difference the weight mig
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I second the back issue of RMM dealing with surf rods. It has helped me immensely, and I still go back to it fairly regularly. Regarding your specific question: I have no idea. Sorry. I could build what you're looking for, but it would take me at least a few hours of test casting to come up with an array. Maybe someone here will be able to help. Good luck.
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I wouldn't say that it's common, Joe, but from what I've seen it's not rare either. It happened to me with a fly rod I built last winter; I placed the tip top in my fingers to take a look at it, and SNAP about an inch and a half broke off. I don't know much about the technical nitty-gritty of manufacturing rod blanks, but evidently due to the very nature of the process, a certain small percen
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I second the spiral wrap. I just spiral wrapped a saltwater boat rod using the bumper / simple spiral method, and the results were outstanding. The one thing I did different from the bumper method (available in a back issue of Rodmaker magazine) was reconfiguring the guides after I flipped them (I ended up with 1 fewer than with a conventional setup), but otherwise followed the directions, and th
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Richard, I'm about the farthest thing from a blank expert here, but I did recently build a similar rod for New Jersey inshore/back bay fishing. My rod was conventional, but the blank I used -- the Lamiglas Tri-Flex CGBT78-1L -- would work great with a Penn Slammer 360. It has enough backbone to handle a good-sized striper or chopper blue, but isn't a meat stick. I have a Penn Slammer 460, and the
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What I don't know about blanks, to steal a line from Raymond Chandler, you could almost crowd into Yankee Stadium. But I do know surf fishing, and I know surf rods (and building them), and I've had great success with blanks from Mudhole (a board sponsor). I've built three or four rods from their special surf blanks, and have been thrilled at the results. They have a 9-foot, 6-inch fiberglass/grap
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Ernie, there's also a website that consigns used fly gear. I don't want to break any rules by posting a link, so either email me or do a google search for "used fly fishing equipment" and it's the third site listed in the results. Good luck.
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Scott, I got into fly fishing, and building fly rods, for exactly the same reasons as your friend -- fly fishing the Jersey shore for stripers, blues, and the other species that come with them. I'm sure you'll do well with any of the blanks mentioned above. But after doing this for a while, I firmly believe that having two rigs, an 8-weight and a 10-weight, is much, much better than having ju
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Ernie, this may come as a suggestion out of left field, but through surfcasting I got turned on to an Australian reel maker, Alvey. I'm a big fan of their side-cast surf reels, and I have one of their saltwater fly reels as well. It's pretty big, and kind of heavy, but the drag is pretty good, and it holds a ton of backing. And it's pretty durable -- I use it on an 11-weight rod, and have banged
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Tim, Michael is right: plate reel seats are used mostly on surf rods, when the butt section is so large that you can't get a tube-style reel seat to fit over the blank. I thought the same thing as you when I first saw a plate reel seat: what the heck are they for? But after reading some posts here (I remember Tom Kirkman recommending one), I used one on my most recent surf rod (a 10-foot, 2-p
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Dave, for whatever my opinion's worth, there's a back issue of Rodmaker Magazine (Volume 8, #2) that shows how to do a Simple Spiral. I have become a diehard convert to spiral wrapping rods; though I don't use conventional reels much, I firmly believe that the spiral is superior to the traditional guides-on-top method. Here's a thread I started a few months ago: . I ordered the back issue of RMM,
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Samer, I had the exact same problem as you a few months ago, and posted this: . I followed what Tom recommended (and what Steve Gardner is recommending above), and found the choke point by bending the blank. I can proudly say that I've used that plugging rod many times since, and it's performed excellently. Looking back, I think now that my concern with finding the exact choke point was a lit
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Thanks, guys. I kinda suspected that spiral would be the way to go, but sometimes it seems that you trust everyone else's opinions more than your own. Cliff - thanks for the suggestion on the bumper guide. It is a 2-piece rod, and I will make sure that by the time the line gets to the second piece it's already on the bottom of the blank. The rod will be a surf bait heaver for the Jersey
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I'm building a conventional surf rod (I wanted this to be an old-school outfit, so I got a Penn Squidder). and I'm just about ready to attach the top, do my testing, and wrap the guides. But I'm having doubts in my head about which way I should do it. Let me say that I am an emphatic believer in spiral wrapping conventional rods. I recently built a boat rod using the bumber wrap method, and t
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Thanks, guys. The rod is ready to be wrapped; I'll be putting in an order shortly.
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I was leafing through a back issue of Rodmaker (I keep a couple in my bag in case I need something to read on the train home from work), and I saw an ad for the new Batson VS3 spinning guide. Well, as it happens, I'm in the process of rebuilding one of my surf plugging rods, and I really liked the looks of the guide. I went to the Batson website, and liked what I saw there even more. But I ca
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Emory, I know exactly what you're talking about -- you'll build a rod whose smallest guide is a size 10, and you'll use a size 10 ring for the top, and when you look at them next to each other the ring in the tip is way, way closer to the blank than the tip-most guide ring is. When discussing surf rods, someone here -- I can't remember who it was or where it was mentioned -- said that he alway
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One recommendation for wrapping and drying: I've found that the tops of computer paper boxes (the ones that 10 reams come in) are very handy wrappers and dryers. They're so readily available (any office will give you as many as you could ever want) that they're practically free and disposable, and I've found that their dimensions are good to work with when wrapping and drying. I would recomme
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I didn't get into building through the rod-repair route -- I started because I couldn't find the rod I wanted commercially -- but I nevertheless love finding old sticks and rebuilding them. The same goes for reels -- I love going to flea markets and yard sales and picking up lovely old Penn Reels. It's amazing what a little work can do to an old rod and/or reel. It's a good way to put those r
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For what my opinion is worth: I've read in a few places - most recently from Lefty Kreh - that guys have used "freshwater" fly reels in salt for as long as 20 years. You have to be a little bit more mindful in cleaning them properly when you're done using them, but they work fine for many years. I will tell you that I regularly use a "freshwater" fly reel in the salt.
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For what it's worth, guys, I let a lot of the discussions on weight drift by on the outgoing tide. I build primarily surf rods, which are heavy, as are the reels that get mated to them. My go-to bottom bait rig, for example, is a 10-foot 3-8 oz. heaver matched with an Alvey side-cast reel (650 BCXL) that weighs 1 3/4 lbs. I did everything I could to keep rod weight to a minimum, and the rig is we
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You know, Mike, I always noticed the same thing on my surf rods, and it kind of bugged me too, though I pretty much ignored it. You look down the shaft of a well-constructed custom surf stick, and the guides form a perfect line -- until you got to the tip-top, where the line diverts because the ring in the top, while the same size as the ring in the tip-most guide, is significantly closer to the
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Thanks, Joe -- and everyone else. I am definitely going to do a spiral wrap. I'll let you know the results.
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Daniel, I got into fly rod building in a similar way to your friend: I wanted to give it a shot, and I wanted to build a fly rod, but I didn't want to spend a fortune. And I learned quickly that when you venture into the world of saltwater fly fishing that it's very easy to spend a fortune. I don't mean to slight any of the other board sponsors, but I have had tremendous experiences with Joe
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Thanks for the input, guys. It was exactly what I was hoping for: I guess I wanted to do a spiral wrap, and wanted "positive reinforcement" before I took the plunge. I will probably get some oddball stares, but I'm used to that: my surf bait outfit is built around an Alvey side-cast reel, and I can't tell you how many times someone walking by has stopped to ask what the heck that co
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