Fly rods tuned and tested

The handles, butts and tiptops are glued to the blank. The process when building rods from now on change character. From grabbing hold on things it’s time to show a gentle touch and fine motor skills.

Rod guides comes in a variety of shapes and material and they play an essential part how your rod going to perform in the end. Not only how they are design but where you place them on your blank makes difference. I been messing a lot with rod guides trying to understand how they impact a rods performance and when it comes to fly rod guides I’ve saddle for a couple of things.

I prefer the American pattern snake rings, those with an oval shape. They are strong, keeps the fly line centered in the guide and preventing line from touching the blank too much. Now there’s nothing wrong with single legged rings but those times when I tested fly rods with single legged guides they seemed less effective. The fly line had a tendency to cling to the blank when casting and create more friction. Now, that’s only my experience and if you like them and the idea of a single guide who will save you a couple of grams in less wrapping and rod finish, those guides are for you.
There's some companies that manufacture guides for fly rods. For this build I choose Saymo guides from H&H company in Great Britain. They are known to stand up to really harsh environments and salty waters. And as my two rods are expected to be used in saltwater they will suite me just fine. 

Another thing when talking of fly rod guides is what size you should choose for your build. My experience tells me, keep them as small as possible. Maybe your rod wan't cast longer than using larger guides but perform more controlled with higher precision. And thereby feel more easy and pleasant to cast.

For my build of a six weight rods I picked size 1 running guides down to a “chocker” of 4 size and a 12 mm stripper guide. I could have used the 1/0 size running guides but with the risk of leader knot problems. So the 1 sized running guides will likely work great.

And another thing I’m going to test this time is lighter guides in the top of the rod. What I hopefully gaining by keeping the tip of the rod as unaffected as possible are a responsive and light feel when casting. The down side could be that they ware out and I have to replace them long before the pension day of the rod. Only time will tell.

Enough said about that, I can hardly wait to cast my rods but first I will do a static test to decide where to place my guides to be as effective as possible.

The static test is time consuming but if done right you will get a rod that cast at it's full potential. The other way around, when the guides are badly placed you put huge stress to blank and even risk the blank to brake. 

The rubber "grips" in the pictures are quit handy when moving the guides in different positions. They are easy to make yourself, just some rubber band in a suitable size and and something preventing them from slipping. 

I'll start by placing the stripper guide where I like it and used to when casting. That's around 79-82 cm(31-32 Inch) from the butt of the blank and the rest of guides I place about equal distance along the blank to the the tip top. This time I used 12 guides in total to start with. 

The aim of a static test are to get the fly line to follow the bend of the blank in a natural way.

So you have to find something that can hold the blank in a position that enables you to put load to it. I have modified an old rod holder. Then I place wight in the top of the blank. That's done by gluing the tip top in a earlier stage and now tying a PET bottle with some water to it. How heavy should the load be? Well, the pressure a fly rod have to handle varies trough the cast, it acts like a catapult so to speak. The only constant load are when you have a fish on the other side of the line. So I'll go for something in the middle and put on a decent amount of pressure but not near fully loading the blank.

After mounting a fly reel and sliding the fly line trough the guides I start moving guides from the tip top down the blank to find a nice curve of the fly line that follows the bend of the blank. And with 12 guides in total its easy to find that curve so I remove one of the running guides and start all over. The curve with 11 guides are still great. So I remove another guide and do the work ones more. With 10 guides the curve is still good but with 9 of them there's a couple of spots creating angels a bit far from the bend of the blank, no matter how I'm trying to tweak and tune the guides. So I'll go for a the lightest and an acceptable set up and use 10 guides in total. 

In the picture above I'll mounted a sage Z-axis 690 rod just to show the bend of it and the placement of the guides. The curve of the fly line could be better though it will work. And if compared to the bend of the sage, the blank from Dan Craft shown in earlier in this post differs quit a bit. Loaded with same wight the sage Z-axis have a rather deep bend. The FXLT from DC reveal a really powerful casting tool. In the same time I think it will really challenge the technic of one casting it.

Talking about casting, the time has come to take my two rods out for the first ride. So I wrap some masking tape to protect the blanks and to temporarily attach the guides to them using the static test scheme .  



The CTS affinity X turned out great. Fast, really smooth and with controlled action. Unfortunately I couldn't somehow get the hang of the Dan Craft rod. It felt kind of raw and just not comfortable in my hand when casting. So I reshaped the handle a bit for a more ergonomic feel and tweaked the setup of the guides. And after some time testing things it felt better. Altho somewhat cranky to handle the rod kicks like crazy when you treat it right. But I think I'll have to work some to get along with this one.
Now all that's left for this rod build are to prepare the guides, wrap and finish them. I leave that for another post. 

Pirate-fishing

Reaming the handle and creating some other stuff.

I’ve learned there’s different ways to make a handle fit the diameter and taper of a rod blank. 

You can ream cork rings, glue them directly to the blank and than form the shape you want. But if something goes wrong along the way doing so, you’re in for a lot of mess to take care of. You can also ream the rings so they will fit the blank, glue them to a taper steel rod and form a handle. To much work if you ask me, when you can take an easier way out.

The pictures shows the way it's done. My handles are shaped but don't have reamed holes to fit the blank so that only leaves two options. Ream by hand or use some kind of power source. Already having an electrical drill the only thing needed is some kind of rod reamer rod. Now there’s maybe a old or broken fishing rods lying around somewhere that could come in handy. If this is the case, now is one of those occasions.

If it happens to be of similar taper and size, strip it  and glue a short piece of metal rod in the thick end. Now the reamer blank can spin in in the jaws of the drill. To finish the job, high quality emery cloth ripped in long and narrow strips glued down to the reamer blank with contact cement. There you have it. Just push and lock the drill power button and ream your handle to the spot where it fits your needs. It works great. The sharpness of the reamer will likely fade after awhile and needs new strips of emery cloth. Just clean the reamer blank and do the trick all over again.

You can also use the reamer when choosing cork or cork based product as a part on your reel seat.

Here you have a skeleton from Batson and brown burl cork.  Great for saltwater application when you want to keep a low weight. 

At last all is done and ready to be attach to my fly blanks.

For this build I had to make some new stuff. I been moving to a new place quit recently and there seemed like some old rod building stuff ended up lost along the way. But that's life, so better start making new ones than cry over spilt milk. 
One thing that comes quit handy are some kind of clamp when assembly the handle, reel seat and other components to the fishing rod blank.  

Of course you can buy a ready made clamp from a rod building supplier but it's pretty easy to make one and don't cost much. And it provides the possibility to suite all kind of application and situations. The clamp on the picture are made for this project but can easily be modified to take longer handles by replacing the threaded rod with longer ones. You can also make slots instead of holes in the wood when you need a clamp for gluing cork rings on a non threaded steel rod.
And all you need is shown in the picture. Some piece of wood, threaded rod, wing nuts plus some really basic carpentry skills. 

A new rod finish dryer

I built a finish dryer some years back and it've suit me just fine. But I thought I build a new one that can dry two blanks instead of one as the process of wrapping and finishing a rod blank is quit time consuming. After google around and searching for different solution I made up my mind to choose a motor that runs on 12 V DC instead of 220 V AC. A DC motor can easily be speed adjusted by pulse-width modulation(PWM controller). And DC motors are quit cheap.
So I ordered two motors, a PWM controller and some other stuff from a shop in China and paid about 300 kr (50 dollar)?!! If I 'd bought the stuff I needed where I live I've had to pay tree times the amount of what I gave order from China, if not more.
Anyway, besides electrical components I needed to prove my basic skills in metal and woodwork because that's the material the dryer will be made of. It went pretty smooth, the hardest part was actually to find small wheels that could fit the minimal approach I wanted for my dryer. But he who seeks shall find what he is looking for in the end.


Raw brass plates for mounting the motors to the wood brace.

Brass plates shaped, drilled,polished and attached to the motors.

Motors placed and ready to be tested. The PWR control and the wheels will come in place when I figure out where to place the dryer. The best environment for finishing things are where there's as little dust as possible so maybe I try out the bathroom. We'll see!

Til next time!

Pirate-fishing

The making of a fly rod handle

An essential part of a fishing rod is the handle. Besides the fun building a fishing rod, a great benefit is the possibility to form it in the shape and size you want. 

My experience when it comes to factory made rods, at least fly rods, is that handles are way to small in diameter. I don’t really know why they shape them so tiny. But a lot of us who fly fish has large hands, me included.In my mind, if the handle is bad for your ability to cast effective it doesn’t matter much if you have a top of the line fly fishing rod. You will end up with a uncomfortable experience and sore underarm by the end of a fishing day. Especially where the environment is harsh and you have do a lot of overhand casting. So my handles will be beefier than those you usually find on a rod in a fly fishing shop .

I haven’t any pictures of the process gluing cork rings to a cylinder so I'll try to explain my methodology making it happen. 

But before that I could mention that I bought cork rings from a guy in Portugal. He stated that the rings he selling are flor quality, the best you can get in cork, but either I got ripped off or the cork in flor quality must have declined over the years. These ring where all right but nowhere near the almost clean rings you got back in time when ordering cork rings of flor quality. 

Gluing cork rings

My process of gluing cork rings is pretty straight forward, I like to keep things as simple as possible.  I'll take a treaded steel rod that fits the 6 mm(0.25 in) diameter of the rings center hole and length of the handle . Then wax ( or use thin silicon tape such as plumber tape) the threads on the steel rod so the glue wan't stick to it when hardens. Next step is to check so the rings have a decent fitting to each other when pressed lightly on the threaded rod. Those small gaps will not be a issue but rings far from flat have to be flatten. I'll found the easiest way to fix them is by ground the sides on medium sandpaper attached to a piece of mirror glass. To finish the job I'll sparsely glue all joint surfaces of the rings with epoxy glue and after placing them on the threaded rod, using wing nuts and large diameter waxed washers to press the rings to a cylinder. Than it's just to wait for the glue to harden. It will vary depending of the type of glue used but I usually choose slow curing epoxies making rods so in about 12 hours time it will be done. 

Hope I made sense trying to explain a way of gluing cork rings. I did my best. 

Anyway, I've also added some nice rings of burl and rubber cork in a pattern I like, trying to differ somewhat from all those factory rods coming from a assembly line somewhere. Don't know if I succeeded but here is how they came out.

Now I want to shape the cork cylinder and to do that I have to have some source that spins the cylinder. My general experience is that you can often count on German machine quality so my power station(a two geared drill from Bosch) is no exception. And some support in form of a ball baring in a piece of wood to brace the steel rod from the drill. I know it's a simple solution but that's how I like it. 

To roughly form the cork I've been trying a lot of different tools and materials but found that a piece of a course wood file works best. You can use the flat side as well as the edges to both form and quickly cut the cork. One thing though, make sure you center the cork cylinder before start cutting and keep it that way. Not positive when things gets out of balance in high speed, your handle or worse some vital parts of your body might end up in a bad state. The final touch of the cork will be made by a 240 and followed by a 400 grid sandpaper. After that the handle is smooth enough. 

A couple of hours and a lot of cork dust later I let things rest. The handles came out alright but not perfect. One handle I had to recenter and fix a small cut in a tricky place. This time I used a 6 mm hard brass rod to turned the handle. You can use a threaded rod to. On a couple earlier  occasions I've been using a hardened steel rod thats dead straight and 8 mm diameter. It makes thing easier. But then you have to bore the cork rings to make them fit. This time I took the lacy way and got away with it.

On the final picture you can see the handles and fighting butts as well. Now I will attach them to the rod blanks but first the handles have to be bored to fit the blanks diameter. How that process is done we leave for another post.

Go for the big ones!

Pirate-fishing

Let's build a couple of fly rods!

I decided to continue my blog in english when it comes to rod building issues. The reason is, a lot more people can take part of information than if I’d used my native language. Now I don’t know if any one’s interested reading of me working some graphite sticks but anyhow, hopefully I’ll write a lot better English some time down the line. That’s a good reason changing the language for me at least. Of course there will be lot of spelling and grammar mistakes along the way, so you language nerds out there, bare with me!

Anyway, enough said about that and let my show a couple of beauties I’ve been working on lately.  My last fly rod project was a Sage Z-axis blank that came out pretty all right. You can watch the build in some old articles(in the Swedish languish).  For this building project I wanted a couple potent blanks that could create more power and speed than Sage ZA.  After many hours  “Google my life away” I’ll came up with two alternatives witch seamed to suite my expectations. One blank from the kiwi islands, CTS affinity X, and one from Oregon USA, Dan Craft FXLT.

3000 Swedish kronor (approx. 450 dollar) poorer the blanks arrived one rainy day. Both are graded for AFTM 6 and seemed quit similar taking a quick look but after a closer inspection you could clearly detect a thicker butt section on the CTS blank and a steeper taper. The FXLT blank had slight thicker walls and the ferrules somewhat unrefined in comparison.

The color of the CTS blank is called golden olive by the manufacturer  The golden part likely comes from all the small metallic flakes in different shades mixed with the olive base color. Nice if you’re the kind who likes a little bling down by the waterside. But I think I would go for the, nicely satin finished charcoal blank, from Dan Craft if having to choose. Well, appearance is one thing and performance is another, so let's start work on all the components and hopefully test out what the blanks are made of as soon as possible.

Go for the big ones! 
Pirate-fishing