No luck on the water. Saw a few BWO’s and the first caddis of the year, but no hits. Water temp was 50. (Got a new thermometer for Christmas this year) Better times are coming.
Time to put on the handle. For a custom rod the ideal thing is to buy cork rings, glue them on the blank, and then turn them down to the desired shape using sandpaper. I have a big hand and I like a thick handle. I made one like that with my three weight and it wasn’t hard at all. My problem now is that I don’t have the lathe capability. I could set up something with my power drill if I had a good vise, or I could buy something for about $100. But as of now I have the premade handle. It is a nice and thin reverse half wells that will look great on this little rod. So in this case I probably wouldn’t do anything different if I made it myself. It would be more fun though.
The only hard part to attaching the handle is to ream out the hole so it will make a tight fit on the blank, while keeping it centered and straight. On my last rod this took about an hour of filing, checking fit, filing, checking fit, ect ect. With this operation you have to go slow since you need to keep it tight and straight and centered along the entire length of the tapered blank. I used a rat tail file and did 10 light strokes at a time, rotating the handle to make it even all the way around. Check often since you can take off a lot of cork real quick and once it’s off you can’t go back.
With this handle I quickly realized I had a problem since the hole in the handle was smaller than the rat tail file so I couldn’t start with that file. But then I checked the fit and found that I really lucked out in that it had a great tight fit with no filing! It looked like a perfect fit! They must make the handles to fit the smallest blank diameters and that is about what I have. So the hardest part of this job was eliminated. I may have to get a thinner rat tail file in the future, but I guess I’ll wait until I really need it. (Note to Vance – the blank butt diameter was .255, not .250 as advertised, that is probably within manufacturing tolerances, working with graphite fibers can’t be as accurate as metal working, also the nominal OD of the handle hole was .250, but I am sure cork has even looser tolerances, anyway I am glad to say that it seemed to work for me, although maybe not as perfectly as I seemed to believe when I did this)
Once again put a protective cover of masking tape over the reel seat and get out the acetone. Mix up a batch of epoxy and coat the part of the blank that the handle will cover. Put a little epoxy in the recess where the fixed hood fits and insert the hood. Then slowly slide the handle down the blank, twisting a little as you go. With a tight fit some excess epoxy will be pushed ahead of the handle so be prepared to wipe this off with a paper towel. After I got the handle all the way down I noticed a little bit of epoxy leaking out inside the recessed area of the fixed hood. I suppose this was some of the excess pushed forward that I didn’t get wiped off. I didn’t want this to set up in there and maybe block the foot of the reel, but it was in the recessed area so I really couldn’t get at it to wipe it off. So I settled on inserting the reel foot then pulling it out and wiping off the epoxy that came out with it. I did this a few times until very little came out, and I figured that the epoxy was stiffening up and not going to flow any more.
Part of this step is gluing on the winding check. This is a small plastic piece (although I suppose they make them of nickel-silver too) that basically trims the upper hole of the handle. It really doesn’t have anything to do with the windings, so really should be called “ugly hole coverer” instead of “winding check”. But in this case since I didn’t do any filing so I didn’t even have an ugly hole to cover. But I put a little epoxy on the cork and put it on anyway. Didn’t want to waste that $.40 part.
Now just let it cure overnight and we will be ready to start with the guides.