Build your own rod - Apply the finish

Due to the current situation I had some time to do the 7th and last step in this series and finish the rod with some nice coats of epoxy.

Tie every day a fly for one year? Hold my beer!

While I'm at home during these chaotic and uncertain time now, I'm looking back at the past year full of fly tying every day. I wanted to write about it for a few weeks and I think now is the best time to travel back in the past to where all had other things in mind than a damn virus.

Simple perch pattern

As the whole world is now affected by the corona virus and we all get showered with news in the TV, radio or the social media 24 hours a day/ seven days a week I think we all need some minutes to forget all this crazy shi**. Don't get me wrong, I'm really concerned about this and I hope every person I love will stay healthy and we will get through this as soon as possible. But sometimes everyone of us need some minutes rest from all of this. In that time I do some fly tying, where I can turn off my head and only focus on the taper of my streamer. Exactly for this situation this SBS is made for.

Build your own rod - Wrapping the guides

This is part 6 of the build your own rod series and after we have placed all guides properly to the blank, we can start wrapping them.


Depending on your personal choice you can wrap the guides with nylon thread or silk.
The biggest difference between nylon thread and silk is that silk becomes translucent/ nearly invisible when applying epoxy finish to it.
For sure also nylon thread is changing its color, white ones is also becoming nearly translucent, but not invisible and the colored ones have the tendency to get darker.
If you don't know whether you like the translucent wraps or you don't know how your thread will change color, you should do some tests on your blank. A good place for such tests is the butt section of your rod blank in the area where the reel seat and grip will be placed. There you can do test wraps and cover them with finish. In the end the reel seat and grip will cover everything so nothing of your tests is visible.

Before I start I want to point out that this is the way I have learned it and I'm not saying this is the best way for wrapping the guides. There are for sure several other methods of how to start a wrap and how to wrap the guides at all, but until now I had no negative experience with it.

First of all we attach the thread to the blank with a piece of tape on the right or left side of our guide.
Then we start spinning the blank slowly and move our thread over the guide to the point where our wraps should start.

Glass is not dead

I always was the carbon guy. The carbon blanks are light, fast, strong and you feel each tug to your bait.

Only for catfish rods I said composite is the best material because of its durability.

But then I saw some really cool pictures on Instagram of how a glass fly rod was build.

I was fascinated by the process and the finished rod. Clear blue blank, chrome guides and thread wraps which were becoming invisible during epoxy coating.

This was something I wanted to do by myself. So I ordered a cheap #3 glass blank, a grip, some guides and started wrapping.

For sure it wasn't my masterpiece, but fishing a rod you've build by yourself and catching fish with it makes much more fun.

Build your own rod - Finding the spine and guide placing

This is part 5 of the Build your own rod series. In this part we will find the spine and place the guides on our blank.

As fist step we clean all blank parts with alcohol. The next step is to find the spine of each blank part.

The spine or overlap is the weakest and strongest part in the blank. This is caused by the base material, because the carbon or fiberglass mat has a start and a end and therefore there is more or less material at these places.

Finding the spine can be done in several ways, my method is to simply hold the part in one hand and press with the other hand in the middle of it. When start rolling it now, you will notice the blank is bouncing into two positions of the blank. One of these points is most of the time stronger than the other. I prefer to put this point to the underside of the rod and place my guides onto this point. In this way I have more power when throwing the fly line forward. But this is only my preference, many others might have a different view on this topic.

Build your own rod - Assemble the handle

This is Part four of the Build your own rod series.
After selecting all materials and components we finally can start building our rod.

As the very first action, we clean our blank with the alcohol to remove finger prints, lipids or anything else. This will help the epoxy to settle down on every part of our blank.