Any rod builders out there?

Hi, I recently decided to give a try at building a fishing rod and since it is (approaching) ice season, I want to build an ice rod. I bought a blank and a bunch of equipment. My first problem though is that the cork rings that I bought to build the handle have an inner diameter of 0.25″. Doing a quick search, it doesn’t look like they sell cork rings with a smaller diameter. The issue comes though that the butt of my blank only measures .15″. What do you do? The two options I can think of is to build up the butt to 0.25″ with tape or to find some cork rings without the hole bored out and then bore a small hole?

For those that are experienced, what is the ‘right’ thing to do?

You can try and find a graphite arbor the right size. You will probably have to ream out the cork to fit the arbor. Check out mudhole.com you will find them there.

To keep it simple, I would build up tape arbors. There are lots of instructions out there on how to do it. Another alternative is drywall tape. The one tricky thing with ice rods is finding handles that fit the blanks. Unfortunately in most cases you’ll either need to buy solid cork rinks and bore yourself or buy prebuilt handles from one of the rod shops like Thorne Bros, DH or TUCR.

So here is what I think I am going to use. I used to brew beer and I still have these corks that were made for champagne bottles (they are actually not mushroom-shaped before going into a bottle. Now I need to bore them out. Is a drill press the way to go? How else do you make sure that the hole is dead straight?

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Not too bad.

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Tape is what is used to build up the blank to fit the cork handles and the reel seat

Got to assist a bit in the building of mine. I built the rod wrapper, and picked all the components. My buddy wanted the rod wrapper bad, so I traded him that for him building the two rods.

I’m going to try and throw another wrapper together this weekend. I’d really like to build a couple open water rods before spring.

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Use cheap masking tape to make your arbors. It absorbs epoxy and will give you a much better bond. I made a jig for holding cork rings and I can use a speed square for straightening most of them out.

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Nice, I saw a design for the cork press in a book. I was thinking about putting one like yours together this weekend. Being someone that likes to tinker so much, I do not know why I haven’t started this earlier.

Do you put the corks together before putting them on the blank? With these cork rings being only 1/2″ in height a piece, it would seem like some of the rings are only on top of the tape while others are seeing the big gap between the tape in the arbor. But glueing them before hand would seem to make the fit difficult if glue leaked into the middle.

Obviously if you did not have to build an arbor, you would put them on the rod while gluing and then into the press before the glue dries like your picture shows.

The Mud Hole videos are on you tube and they are great for beginners learning.

I buy my cork ice handles from MH Part R-5-1875-Cork
$6 each with a .1875″ ID hole 1″ OD
http://www.mudhole.com/search?keywords=R-5-1875%20cork

Mudhole has piles of info.

A good book is Rod-Building Guide by Tom Kirkman
It is what I used starting out and still look at.

I started building rods 20 years ago because you couldn’t find ice fishing rods longer than 30 inches. We were making trips to lake of the woods lake trout fishing and we needed longer, heavier rods. I used pre made handles just because it was faster and I wasn’t trying to build a work of art, just a functional rod that was not available on the market at the time. I have since given all my equipment to a cousin that lives in red wing and he is into building fly rods. I haven’t seen any of them in person, but in the pictures they look fabulous. I used to buy all my equipment at wild river distributing in marine on the st Croix Minnesota. That was nice because I could go there and hand pick all my blanks.

Thanks for all the info! Those mudhole videos are great. I’ll try to post a pic of the finished product.