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