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.

Wrap all over the guide until you reach the point where the wrapping should start. Keep an eye on the space between the start of your wraps and your guide. I try to make them smaller the more I get to the tip. Worse would be when the space for the stripping guide is smaller than on the first guide at the tip, cause I try to reduce weight in the tip part of the rod and more wraps means more epoxy and more weight.

Now do a vertical wrap and "over-wrap" the first wrapping in direction to the guide. In this way you lock the thread by its elf and it won't get lose.

Do some more wraps to really lock the thread in place.

Then remove the tape and cut off the loose thread end as close as possible to the wraps.

Important when wrapping with silk, but also with any other thread, pack your wraps. Don't let there be any gaps, cause they won't look that nice when finished.

Wrap up the foot of the guide, then you can remove the tape which holds the guide in place.

For the next step you need a thread loop. I keep it really simple and use any kind of thread available, but in a different color.

Wrap and pack until you have left space for at least 8-10 wraps. Then lay the prepared loop under your thread wraps. Important is that you keep an eye on where the "end" of the loop is, cause it should point to your guide.

Wrap up to the end of the foot, but don't wrap to far up the guide because then you will get some problems when finishing with epoxy. I'll come to that later when we do the epoxy thing.

Pull the loop tight and cut of the tailing piece of tying thread.

Then pull the loop and the tail of your thread underneath the wrappings. Make sure to pull it really under all wraps, not only one or two. Otherwise the whole wraps will unwind.

Repeat this step for all guide foots. As a last step you can do some ferule wraps at the end of the blank pieces. Some say this is needed for the stability of your blank piece, but in fact some thread and epoxy won't prevent the blank end to break. The only thing that would really keep the blank together would be a metal ring, but I'm not a fan of that on my rods. In my opinion this is not really needed when putting the pieces together in a proper way. Also some blank manufactures create their blanks with an included support in the end of each piece. But I think it looks nice so I ferrule my butt ends. 

Keep your time wrapping all the guides and if you are not really satisfied with one wrap, I would rather cut it off and do it again instead of botching them. After every guide is wrapped, we can start finishing it with epoxy. This we will handle in the next part.