This blog has been silent too long. A somewhat impulsive move fifty miles north to Santa Cruz put a damper on writing and rod building (although thankfully not on fishing, I'm not crazy after all).

Now that we are settled, I finally turned back to the fiberglass rod that I had begun to "restore" in July. When I last posted I have stripped the finish off the rod and recoated it with spar-varnish. 

The next step was to find the spine of the rod and lay out the guides and attach the tip top. The original rod had only 5 guides, but I decided to go up to a more modern configuration with 7 guides.

n lieu of purchasing a a fancy rod-wrapping stand for my first project, I whipped out my exacto-knife and cut a box down a box with two notches for the rod. I made supports for the spools out of pencils and used a book for a tensioning device. I am going to grade the overall result as a B+. The wrapper works, but at times it looses thread tension and it was hard to keep the wraps laying perfectly against each other.

It was at this point that I put the rod down and started packing boxes for our move to Santa Cruz. In the intervening months I promised the rod to new fly-fisher and T&Ser Ariel, who caught her first trout on a fly this July on the Lyell Fork of the Tuolumne river in Yosemite.

When I finally unpacked the rod, I used a white paint pen to inscribe it, and then proceeded to epoxy the wraps and inscription. While this might have gone smother with a better set up, and with a turning motor, I think it was a pretty good result over all.

All in all, I really enjoyed this project. Having "fixed up" this rod has piqued my interest in rod building, and I certainly know a lot more about rods than I did when I started. 

To finish this project off I just have to make a rod sock and test cast it. I'll let you know how it goes

-Posted by Eben