I've seen these fully exposed real seats like the one on the carrot stik. where can I find these at?  Ive looked at four different places and have not found them. I did see that castaway has makes them but could not find were to buy them.

Those seats are what use to be called skeleton seats. The ones used by the rod makers your looking at are either made for them or made by them using the ECS baitcasting seats.

Checking the angler resource website (Fuji) they no longer make the skeleton casting seat they only make them for spinning rods.

I've found them. Castaway makes there line. Swamp land tackle is getting them there was something wrong with the seat so there coming out with an improved model. Thanx anyway.

The new style, full length cut out (with one piece top) model is much better anyway (IMO) there had been reports of a lot of rod breakage with the Tharp style skeletons.

Yea I remember when the guys on the other board were working with Tharp on the split seats and the SHXi blanks failing between the 2 pieces, they (mfg's) have been playing with that idea of splitting seats for a long time. I tried them back in the 90's while Fuji was still producing them, personally I don't trust um...

Tight Wraps!

From what I have gathered the only breakages of the blank between the split reel seats have been extremely over-stressed.  I can't see a rod breaking there without actually trying to break it.  Swampland has the fully open back Castaway seats which can be modified to a split more easily than some others.

Anthony

It's not just from over stressing it, the reel seats are rigid and when the blank flexes it ovals out a little... when it flexes under the inflexible portion of the seat by the trigger, there is no where for the blank to give, so it collapses. in a "normal" seat, there is an arbor which will give slightly and a gap between the "neck" and front which distributes the stress a little.

A Tharp seat is like bending a rod over a countertop... if you held it down at the edge, that's where it would break, every time. Same concept.

There are ways to cushion the tharp style seat where it won't break, if you really want one. You can relieve the edge or arbor it, both ways will work.

Thanks Keith...