I recently completed a rod build for my friend Ned. He has been fishing with us on-and-off  for the las year, and it was time for him to get his own rod. He picked himself out a nice 8.5 Foot Orvis Hydros blank, yellow whipping thread, a reverse half-wells grip and Struble up-locking reel seat with a zebra maple spacer. 

He got a chance to take it out for a spin this weekend at the Little Sur trout opener, which I hope to write more about later in the week. I don't love graphite rods, but I have to say that this hydros is a true mid-flex, and loads quite nicely. Ned was able to make the short delicate casts necessary to catch these little trout on a dry-fly.

Recently, I have been finishing my rods with thinned spar varnish, but for this more modern rod,  I thought I would use light build epoxy. Epoxy definitely saves a lot of time drying, especially on a four piece rod, but I think I get a cleaner, smoother result with varnish. One advantage of epoxy was that I was to make transparent ferrule wraps by mixing epoxy with acetone. This saved trying to find a thread color to match the blank. 

I have to say I really enjoyed making a rod for a friend. It let me branch out with style and materials, and gave me an excuse to keep building, even when I don't necessarily need another rod for myself.

--Posted by Eben

Recent weeks have been short on time for fishing, projects and blogging, sadly resulting in a severe drop-off in the number of blog-posts. Mea Culpa.

Last weekend was the general trout opener here in California, and while I will still have to wait a bit to fish my favorite coastal streams and Sierra rivers, I am looking forward to trying out some new waters in the upcoming days and weeks, and I will make sure to keep the blog updated.

In the meantime, I have gotten a chance to put a few hours into the Eclectic Angler reel kit I got for christmas. These kits, made by fellow Massachusetts-er Michael Hackney, are really nice. He has taken a lot of the shop work out of the equation by rough cutting the brass and aluminum pieces, but left enough work to do so that you can get a true sense of accomplishment from finishing your own reel (or at least that is what I imagine it will feel like when I get around to finishing it).

The first phase of the kit requires sanding and filing all the pieces so that the spool plates can move easily within the reel, and then test-assembling the reel so that you can customize the action and make sure all the parts fit together properly.

The next step in the process will be to take the reel apart and sand and polish it up nicely before final assembly. 

I want to point out that Michael is a really nice guy to work with, my kit was missing a spring washer (more likely I lost it), and he sent me a new one, along with a nice little eclectic angler screwdriver. 

I still have a lot of projects in the que, including the Orvis Hydros build that is nearing completion, so there should be a lot more blog posts in the future.

--Eben

Well, I have been quite busy with work and non-fishing travel, so I have not had much time to fish or work on any of my projects. I was hoping to steal a day from this weekend, but the wall of rain falling outside my window has made that impossible. 

Fortunately the mailman has been very good to me this week, and I have now received the last components I need to build the Orvis Hydros rod for my friend Ned. 

I took the blank up to the Bay area this weekend so that Ned could see it, and pick out a reel-seat insert, grip style and thread colors. He picked our a very nice Zebra insert, a reversed half wells grip and yellow/silver wraps. I have yet to set up a good cork lathe, so the grip is pre-formed by Struble, with a nice inlet to match the Struble reel-seat hardware. 

If the rain keeps up, I might get quite a bit of the work done on this rod over the weekend. At the least, I would like to epoxy the handle section, lay out the guides and wrap the ferrules. 

As always, I'll post updates here as I go.

--Posted by Eben

It has been pretty busy here project-wise. I've just rounded up work on a series of fiberglass rods and I think I am going to be switching gears for a few weeks to some new projects. 

Eclectic Angler Bi-Metal Reel

For Christmas I received a kit to build a this neat little brass and aluminum reel. The kit is manufactured by fellow Massachusetts-er  Michael Hackney at Eclectic Angler. In addition to making ands selling classic fly reels and kits, Michael is the author of The Reelsmith's Primer, and  administers an online forum for reelsmiths. 

The kit itself includes pre-cut reel pieces, and other components to finish and assemble. I have not done a lot of metal working, but I think I should be able to handle the polishing and filing required.

Orvis Hydros Graphite Fly Rod

One of my personal projects of the last couple of years is getting my friends involved in fly fishing. One of my recent success stories has been my friend Ned, who has come on more than one fishing excursion, including last year's excellent trip to the Tuolumne river in Yosemite. He has enjoyed it enough that it is time that he had his own rod. I am honored that he is trusting me to build it for him. I am not a lover of graphite, but as a former Orvis retail associate I can say that they make some pretty rods, especially for a beginner. Therefore, I am going to build him a 8.5 ft, 5wt Orvis Hydros. Orvis finishes these out with a a lovely blue thread and aluminum reel seat, but at Ned's request, I think we will be using a more traditional wooden reel seat, and a contrasting thread.

Unknown Bamboo Production Rod Restoration

My Dad picked up this bamboo rod last year at an antique store, and fished it for a couple of months before the stripping guide came off and it was clear that the rod was in need of some serious TLC. After consulting some knowledgable folks, I have determined that it is a post WWII Japanese rod, and probably has little collector's value. Therefore I am going to modernize it for fishing, upping the number of guides from 6 to 8, and replacing the bent chrome ferrules with nickel-silver.

So the postman was good to me this week and brought me a lot of three broken fiberglass rods I got for a song on eBay. My hope is to build on the experience I gained from the fiberglass rod repair project I just finished, and take "rebuilding" to a new level. With these rods, I want to teach myself to rebuild a rod from the blank up, which means that I will be stripping off the cork and in some cases the reel seat and fitting them with all new hardware. As the goal was to gain the experience of working on the rods, I paid little attention to what rods were in my lot, but I am nonetheless pleased that the three rods that arrived on my doorstep friday afternoon represent a variety of actions, lengths and constructions. 

The rod with the most potential of the three is the 8ft St. Croix "Power Built" which appears to be a fiberglass rod filled with urethane foam. According to the label it is for a 5wt level line or a 6wt DT line.  Of the three it was the only one in cast-able shape and it through my 6wt WF line nicely.

The cork is really brittle on this rod and already has a big chip out of it, so I won't feel guilting about redoing it, even though it probably could be fished as is. The one thing I won't be changing on this one is the reel seat. I really dig the red and gold, and the sliding band has "St. Croix" stamped nicely into it, so I t seems like a shame to waste it. I think I will work on this one last of the three.

Of the three this one is the most like a club, but that said, I don't currently have  a nice heavy bass rod, and while trout are the preferred quarry of T&S (hence the name), I always have a shot at nice smallies when I head back to New England. The rod is in pretty bead up shape, and I think I will probobly strip this one down first. From a sizable gauge out of the finish on the label, it looks like it might be the same color as the first project rod under the green paint.

I am a big fan of short rods, and this one has just enough give to it to maybe be a 4/5 wt (at leas in my dreams). The label is pretty torn up so I don't know what it is, but the cork has a strange plastic cap on it, which I haven't seen before, and the tip seems to be translucent where the paint has scratched off, which is very exciting to me.

I will probably tackle the Actionrod first, and then the 7footer, saving the St. Croix for last. I will keep the blog updated as I go.