Some of my inkjet printed waterslide pics have gone a few seasons without fading. The waterslide media won't crack. You'll want to use the media with white paper backing. Make sure the ink is dry before coating with Krylon. Give it at least two light coats of the krylon allowing to completely dry between coats. Once the waterslides are mounted you may want to dab a little CP along the ed
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You may want to consider building the rods with underspin reels instead of the typical thumb-on-top kinda closed face reel. I've found that my nephews and nieces learn to cast these underspin reels much more easily than the thumb-on-top reels, they don't have the extra weight on top of the rod that they need to hold up, and once they get older you can simply swap out the underspin reel for a sta
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As Tom said, the foam will stick just fine; as in any adhering you do want to make sure you have a water break free surface. Like Brad, I'll build my grips seperate and mount to the blank once I'm sure I like what I have. I do pour the foam directly on the blank to mount reel seats rather than shaping/reaming/gluing arbors but if you don't want a mess you need to be careful about the measuring
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You may also want to check out some fly blanks. They're available in short sections, are very light, and the reel doesn't care if it's labeled as a fly blank or spinning or whatever. If you like a shorter rod with softer action you can drop the butt section and use the next section as the butt section for your build.
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¿Sabía usted que construir o es fabricado?
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For the phonebook tensioner you put your spool of thread in something like a coffee cup and pass the thread through the phonebook so that the weight of the pages holds tension on the thread; more pages, more tension. Any time you put tension directly on the thread you stand a good chance of pulling out 'fuzzies' in the otherwise smooth thread. Thicker twisted thread types also have a tendancy t
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There's an Equipment and Tools section to the photogallery here: You can search for just about anything and find someone here has devised a simple inexpensive home made rig. You don't need much to get started, I've been building for four years now, personal use and presents, going on rod number seventy five, and I still use the cardboard box with V notches and the phone book for thread tension
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I put a minima seat on a spinning rod and, as George mentions above, I found it very uncomfortable without the "hump" for the palm. Here's how I fixed mine...
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What are you fishing for and how do you plan to use the rod; flipping for Florida bass, long range casting for Musky, trolling for Stripers... ? What kind of line; braid with floro leader, all mono... ? What reel; casting, spinning, do you know the model number you'll be using... ?
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You may want to consider a minima seat... Much less weight and full blank contact. You will want to position the locking nut using the reel that he plans to use on the rod.
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I don't use Picassa 3 so I can't help you there but I do have a few other editing programs I use and in all of them the edited image defaults to the same directory as the original image. I start with my images on my hard drive and they end up there too.
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As mentioned above, the extra patterns at the end of your wraps will help a lot in keeping your wraps tight through the patterns that will show in the final wrap. I also find that wrapping with more than one thread at a time helps to keep the threads tight. If you wrap with one thread at a time you have lots of crossovers that tend to spread your threads out and make packing more difficult. If
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I perfer to use a lite build for wetting out decorative wraps where there is a lot of air trapped in the layers of thread. For me it seems to work better at penetrating the threads and squeezing out those tiny bubbles that tend to sit in the cross wraps. I've only done a few tartans so far but I believe the lite build works much better as a first coat on these than the high build.
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A grip contoured to his hand could give better leverage to the other fingers. I think expanding polyurethane foam would be the way to go (check out Riley Rods in the sponsor list). I've only made a handful of these contoured grips but for what it's worth I've found that if you contour to the fingers too much then there is no room for shifting your grip and it gets uncomfortable after a short wh
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They make excellent Christmas, birthday, etc. gifts. Build a rod for one of your wife's nephews, nieces, her dad, or whatever and see if she doesn't start encouraging you to build more for others. My niece has a boy that just had a birthday and she gave him a certificate for a custom fishing rod with my phone number so he could call me and describe exactly what he wanted. I'm already working
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With a light coat you would only have to flip over every few minutes :)
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I built a 4wt Pack rod for just this purpose. The handle has female ferrules in both ends. With the rod mounted to one end ti's an ultra-lite spinning rod and my mini-mite reel is spooled up with 10# invisiline and flourcarbon leader. With the rod mounted to the other end it's a small stream fly rod. It works great; one rod, two reels.
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I'll second the Coolpix; inexpensive, compact, lightweight, just a few of the most needed functions and they're easy to figre out. I keep one in my tackle bag to get pics of the lunkers I catch. I've got quite a collection of other anglers :) For convenience I picked up one of those thumbnail drives that accepts the memory cards from the camera and I've got a few of the cards so I can easily s
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Just getting started in building your own rods? Just wait until you realize that you really really really need twenty two rods, and spares :)
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I just recently played around with checking out how well CP penetrated or if it stopped the epoxy from penetrating... I used lightly wrapped silk thread so I can see inside the wrap and used three heavy coats of CP. After the solvent evaporated there was very little solid matter remaining and the tunnels never got filled. The cured CP didn't stop the epoxy from getting in the tunnels but t
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Tom and Billy both make excellent points but they're talking from two different perspectives. If you just want to post viewable pics on the photo page here then you don't need super high resolution images with magazine quality layout. A simple point and shoot, autofocus, autoexposure, with macro setting, and "small image" resolution will usually do the job just fine. As Ray pointed o
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Digital images such as JPG are stored in a compressed format to reduce file size. Blocks of similar color are batched into blocks of image data. When the final image is resized for printing you will usually end up with some wavyness (demarcation lines) where the batches come together. For this reason many of the high end digital imaging production vendors prefer to use specific image formats t
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If you marked your crossover points backwards, wider at the butt and narrower at the tip end of the wrap, then you'ld be closing at the tip end while you still had pleanty of gap at the butt end. It sounds to me like you're packing the middle well and not packing so well at the ends.
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The wraps under the pattern will show through. The technique you're describing is similar to what's used for Tartan wraps and they can look very nice if the colors are selected and layered correctly; dark colors first and the lighter, more transparent, colors on top; sometimes a dark color on top for contrast or to establish a pattern. The few tartans I've tried have been on a white painted bla
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If the "27x" you refer to is what I think it is then it does not result in more guides. The 27x I know of is simply a method for determining initial placement of the "Intersect" guide in the artical that Donald mentions above. You measure your reel's spool diameter and multiply that by 27 to get the distance from the spool to the intersect guide. There would be one or more
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As Tom said, they're lighter and have an excellent grip. If you make the initial investment for supplies to pour your own then the cost per grip can work out to be much less than EVA; my last $60 worth of foam and sleeves has made over 50 grips and I've just mixed up the last of my foam into a block that I can cut and shape into a few more. Sleeved Foam has design possabilities and applicatio
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I was figuring on an underspin, Zebco or Pfluger, used both and they work very well for small kids. As they get bigger they can replace it with a regular spinning reel too.
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I built a couple of the Mudhole specials and they are very good and do look real kool... This boy will be bicycling so I think I'll go with the Netcraft blank, it's both fiberglass and two piece. I hadn't thought to check out Netcraft, thanks Gary.
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I've got another nephew coming of age (five) and wanted to build him a rod. I built a few for other nephews and nieces on Ugky Stik blanks with underspin reels and they worked out real well. I can't find any Ugly Stik blanks now. Does anybody know of a source or a recommended substitute? Something around 6', casting a wide mix of bobbers, sinkers, poppers, crank baits, plastic boats, sister's
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For guide wraps I'll have the thread coming onto the wrap at a slight angle to keep it tight against the previous wraps, tugging every few wraps to tighten up (I hand wrap), and using my thumbnail every half dozen or so wraps. For large wraps I'll also use a regular plastic packing tool every dozen or so wraps, for small wraps I'll use a bodkin once I get near the end, and I'll pack the threads
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