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.

Next step is to place the guides on the blank.

The guide placement is a big thing for a lot of rod builders, especially when it comes to spinning rods. In the beginning I put a lot of effort thinking where to place the guides, but now for fly rods I keep it pretty simple.

On three part rods I place the stripping guide on top of the handle part, on four part rods I place it at the beginning of the second part. The handle part won't get a guide. The rest of the guides will be placed in more or less the same distance between them on the other blank pieces.

Compared to the casting guys we don't have to worry that much about the casting distance with thin lines. 

But of course you can create a calculation for guide placements, nothing speaks against that. 

Lay down the blank in full length, and mark with a marker pen the place where a guide should be.

Very important is to check if the guides lay flat on the blank. Often it can happen that the guide is laying on the blank in a curve. With small pliers you can bend the foots of your guide straight so the whole guide lays flat on your blank.

This procedure should be done for all guides. It improves the durability of the connection between guide, thread and blank when finished.

As next step I cup masking tape in small pieces. They are used for holding the guide in place on the blank. The middle point of the guide should be at the place we marked in the step before.
Try to align all guides when placing them. Its very hard to align them after you have wrapped them with the thread or silk. It's working when only small corrections need to be done, but it's nearly impossible to move the wrapped guide by 90°, because the thread wraps will move or you bend the whole guide

After all guides are aligned, we can start wrapping them.
This we will handle in the next step of this series.