Courting Disaster

Spent the morning in bed sleeping in and having Father’s day breakfast delivered to me. An omlet (spinach, feta with basil, mushrooms, peppers and tomatoes) with some coffee, bacon and toast. I drove the girls out to Friendly Grove park where we ran, played on the big toy and chased low flying sparrows. I mowed the lawn for my exercise stopped for a rest and then walked into my garage. My CLEAN garage.

I puttered around with my Radio Shack electric motor and discovered that it was way to fast and twitchy to work for my rod drier design. Bummer! Alas, I could probably do some sort of gravity drive with a flywheel but instead Chelle suggested I get a professional rod drier. Espcially if I plan on making another rod someday. No sooner said than done.

I spooled up a new flyline on a new trout reel and then turned my attention to the box in the corner. The long skinny one that held the bits and pieces of Athena. Out came the four rolled graphite sections, two handle sections, a reel seat and a bag full of guides. Step one. File the bore through the handle sections so that they will fit on the high diameter Batson Co blank. The bottom guide went first. It was tricky to get the far end reamed out enough for the rod to fit. Over and over I’d work on it with the rasp and then check, rasp and check, rasp and check until finally it slipped over the butt end of the bottom section of the rod. I pushed it down and it wouldn’t go all the way. I tried pulling it off to rasp some more and POP off came the bottom section. Step one apparently wasn’t as easy as it might have seemed.

Clearly this wasn’t ideal. Livy and Carly had brought their lawn chairs into the garage to watch me, as though I was a one man croquet or badmitten match and when it broke Livy piped up with, “Daddy, you have to perservere. That means don’t quit.” I smiled to myself and promised her that I would. Digging around my scrap wood pile I found an old section of oak dowel that I used to pin together pieces of wooden hand planes that I built. I wrapped it in masking tape until it plugged straight into the bottom of the rod blank and the end of the handle equally tight. I then mixed up a tiny batch of rod building epoxy, stuck the plug firmly in the end of the handle and pushed it onto the rest of the blank like a tinkertoy. The epoxy squeezed out of the crack in the cork, I wiped it off and looked closely to check the fit. Diaster averted! The plug assembly seemed just as strong as the rest of the handle.

Next I began rasping the fore-grip. More carefully this time and paying more attention to the taper of the rod itself. Slowly but surely it began to fit the blank until finally it slid down easily over the section of rod just above where the reel seat would go. In a sandwich bag I saved the cork-dust to be mixed tomorrow with good old fashioned wood glue for filling the crack where the bottom grip busted off.

The spacers for the reel seat are wrapped on in masking tape, layer after layer of blue rough tape. Another batch of epoxy is mixed and we can hold a reel now. Some light spacing is done for the fore-grip by way of masking tape again and following a good thick coating of epoxy on it goes.

Now she sits in the garage curing until tomorrow when I will begin marking the guide-spacings and perhaps wrap the winding check and hook keeper. Clean garages rule!