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IMPORTANT
SITE UPDATE:
Visit the relaunched
Fish & Fly at fishandfly.com
Building
your own fly rod - part 4
Our April 2002 contribution from Terry Lawton
A rod's handle, made from the best corks obtainable, makes a major contribution to the overall appearance and pleasure of ownership and use. Very high quality corks - known as Flor grade - have a fine grain and should have no holes or pitts in them. Such corks will last much longer than inferior ones.
There are two ways to put a rod handle on a rod: buy a pre-shaped handle which is quick and easy, or make it out of cork shives (rings) and turn and sand it to shape on a lathe. Either way, buy the very best quality handle or corks that you can get for looks, comfort and durability.
For a single-hand rod an uplocking reel seat is always to be preferred: such a seat places the reel at its closest to the casting hand which is correct technically and should the rod be stood on its butt, the rim of the reel will be kept clear of the ground.
A wide range of reel seats is available from nylon to aluminium, silver, gold or black anodised, to nickel silver with inserts of all sorts including carbo fibre and exotic woods. The choice of reel seat and insert will depend on personal preference and your budget.
Making your own handle
When making a handle from cork rings, make sure that you use the densest rings at the front of the handle where your thumb applies most pressure when casting. Similarly the overall appearance of the handle will be enhanced if you use a particularly fine quality ring at the end of the handle next to the reel seat.
"Typical length for the handle
will be between
180 and 200mm (7 or 8 inches) for a single-hand trout rod"
You will need to mark the position of the handle on the butt section
of the rod; the marks are the limits for the glue. Firstly assemble the
reel seat and slip it over the end of the rod and then mark the position
of the top of it with a pencil or felt marker pen. If you are using a
down-locking reel seat, the bottom cork will fit tight up against it.
With an uplocking seat the bottom cork ring will cover the shoe into which
the reel foot slides. Having taken these factors into account, you can
mark the top of the handle with a piece of tape. Typical length for the
handle will be between 180 and 200mm (7 or 8 inches) for a single-hand
trout rod. If you make the handle longer there will be a tendency to hold
the rod too far from the butt.
The bottom cork must have a recess cut in it for the reel seat housing,
if you are using a uplocking reel seat. This can be done with a scalpel
and a file. Hold the top end of the reel seat against the bottom end of
the handle or lowest cork and draw round the outside of the reel seat
with a pencil. Then carefully cut and file a recess in the cork until
it is a snug fit and covers the reel hood.
The cork rings will have to be reamed out to fit the butt section: this means producing a tapered hole. Use a piece of tapered dowel with sandpaper wrapped round it. When each cork ring is a good fit on the blank - loose enough to slide down the rod blank but not so loose that it is a sloppy fit - number them before removing them so that you can glue them back in the right order. Each cork should be nicked in the central hole with a triangular file to provide a keyway for the glue. Gluing and fitting each ring individually will ensure that you make a solid handle that will never work loose. Glue each cork in place, having first roughened the blank to ensure a good key for the adhesive, making sure that you coat each face of each cork with glue as each cork must be stuck firmly to its neighbour. Use the clamp to hold the cork rings tightly against each other. Although epoxy is strong and cures quickly, when cured it is very hard and may make shaping the handle difficult. A waterproof woodworking glue such as Evo-Stik Resin W overcomes this problem but does take longer to cure.
"Try to avoid over tapering
the front cork
as it will make it thin and weak"
When the adhesive is hard, remove any surplus glue with sandpaper before starting to shape the handle on a lathe. Great care must be taken to keep the handle symmetrical and not remove too much cork. Wrap some masking tape around the blank hard up against the top cork to protect the blank. Start off with a sharp chisel and then increasingly fine grades of sandpaper. Try to avoid over tapering the front cork as it will make it thin and weak. Do copy an existing handle style that you favour - either on an existing rod or an illustration - otherwise you may end up with something rather odd and mis-shapen.
Any holes or pits that have resulted from turning the handle should be filled individually with a mixture of cork dust and adhesive which is then sanded flush with the cork's surface, using increasingly finer grades of paper to give a really smooth finish. It is good practice to fill any pits and holes before you get too near the finished shape and size of handle as it is easy to get carried away and remove too much cork, resulting in a handle smaller than desired.
If you have no access to a lathe which will take the butt section of your rod, you can make your handle on a short length of dowel, suitably but lightly greased so that you can remove the cork rings when glued together. The basic handle can now be pushed on to a rod or dowel and turned to shape on a small lathe. You will then have what is, in effect, a pre-formed handle but one that you have made yourself.
If turning the handle on a lathe, if the end of the reel seat is fixed, you must fit it after turning operations otherwise you cannot hold the rod in the lathe. If there is a detachable end plug, then you can fit the reel seat before turning.
The reel seat can now be assembled and fitted. Unless the internal diameter of the reel seat matches the external diameter of the butt of the rod, you will either have to open up the hole with a file or build up the butt to match the internal diameter of the bore of the seat.
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Enlarge the hole with a fine round file, taking care to keep the hole round and in the middle of the spacer. As with all similar operations it is best to do this slowly and carefully and to keep checking the fit. If you have to build up the butt of the blank, this can be done by wrapping very tightly two or three separate bands of masking tape round the rod shaft.
The gaps between the bands will be filled with adhesive when you fix
the real seat. It is easy to make the final adjustment by adding or removing
some tape.
When the reel seat is a precise fit, it can be glued to the rod shaft
with epoxy, taking care to ensure that it is fitted the right way round
and in line with the intended line of the rings or guides. Clean off any
surplus glue before it has time to cure.
When using a pre-formed handle it can be difficult to ensure that there is enough glue to hold the handle firmly in place. Cutting a shallow slot or vee-shape the length of the inside of the handle will help the glue to squeeze out at the top of the handle as you push it onto the butt of the rod. If you make your own pre-formed handle, you can cut a slot in each ring and take care to align the slots as you glue each ring in place.
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If you decide to use a pre-formed handle and an up-locking real seat, you will have to cut a recess in the bottom of the handle for the reel seat hood as described already. If it is a tight fit you will have to taper the hole inside the handle until it slides down the rod, from the top, to just short of its final position. Work carefully with a round file, making sure that you keep the hole in the centre and that you taper its complete length - not just the ends of the hole. If you do not taper the hole in the middle as well, you will not be able to fix the handle securely. File a small amount at a time and keep checking the fit frequently.
When you are happy with the fit, roughen the butt end of the rod blank as above and coat with glue. Slide the handle down the rod, having first made sure that the recess in the end lines up with the reel seat. Now place the butt end of the rod against a wall and push the handle over the hood on the reel seat until the hood is completely covered. Wipe off excess glue above the handle and make sure that there is no glue in the reel seat hood.
An extra embellishment is to fit a nickel silver or aluminium winding check to the top of the handle. These are available in a wide range of diameters and it is simply a matter of buying one of the right diameter and gluing it in place with epoxy. You may want to fit a fly keeper just above the handle. Fly keepers can be bought ready made or you can make one yourself from a short length of fine stainless steel or nickel silver wire.
The last job to be done is to fill any pits in the handle, using the cork dust made by the sanding and shaping operations. If you used a pre-formed handle you should buy a cork ring which you can use as a source of dust for this operation. If you do not fill the pits you will spoil the looks of the finished rod and they will up with dirt and grime from your hand. The final sanding should be done with a very fine grade of sandpaper to ensure a really nice smooth finish.
Cork ring clamp
A simple clamp to press together the corks while the glue sets can be made up from two squares of wood and some strong cord. Drill a hole in the middle of each piece of wood, just larger than the diameter of the rod butt, and a small hole in each corner. The cord is threaded through the small holes and knotted so that it does not come out.
One piece of wood is placed against the top ring of the handle and the other against the bottom ring. You can then use a pencil or screwdriver to tighten the cords at the butt end, thus squeezing the corks together tightly.
< Read Terry's introduction to rod design and construction
Terry Lawton is a passionate nymph fisherman who caught his biggest wild brown trout (in the UK) - 4lb 2oz - on a home-tied variant of a goldhead, Sawyer-style pheasant tail nymph.