I am building a 76m crank bait rod on a Rainshadow blank  I have been slowly working on this for the past couple months and finally got it wrapped and have about half of it Epoxied.   Not the cleanest but I am happy with it so far.  I have experimented a little on the wrapping.  I have the silver highlights on the lower wraps and skipped them on the upper.   I also wrapped in front of the guide on a couple of them to see how it would turn out.  

A VERY good first rod. I especially like the ramp design and execution.  Your wraps look very tight and uniform, good work.  Let me make a few comments, which are mostly about personal preferences:

It may be the photo, but one wrap looks like the color preservative isn't quite strong enough.  A little color inconsistency?  If you are not using two coats of CP, I would recommend two.

 You may want to try less cork on your next build and see how you like it.  Cork is really expensive, and if you use it in areas where you don't touch the rod, it's wasted money and weight.

You may want to experiment with narrow trim wraps which to some seem more elegant than wide ones.  http://www.rodbuilding.org/library/narrowtrim.pdf

It looks like the distance from the reel stem to the butt may be pretty long.  When you use the rod with a rain coat or other clothing, be sure it doesn't hang up while doing some fishing actions.  Record what that distance is.  If it's right, you will do the next rod the same way; if it's too long, you will have reference for shortening it on the next build

 

There will be many more builds,and I'm sure there are some spectacular ones in your future.

 

 

Nice , clean first build. I concur with Mick on the cp. the othe thing I picked up on was that epoxy is half done. If that means 1 coat am needs a 2nd ok. If only half the guides are done, you're working too slowly and fussing with the finish too much. Keep up the good work. "It's about progression not perfection"

Thanks for the critiques,  Love hearing them J

 

I actually did not use CP on this build.  I wanted to see how it would look without it.  It may just be the light in this picture or it could be some excesses oil from my hands that could have caused this.  I did back up and rewrap some of these a few times.   I will see tonight.

 

I agree on the smaller trim bands.  I was originally thinking about that But I was having a hell of a time with the metallic thread when I was trying to lock them.  I figured I would take some more time to practice before I tried the smaller bands again.

 

The handle is actually 12 inches.  From the angle it does look a lot longer.  But I am actuality a fan of full grips.  I fish from a kayak and keep my rods in holders for trolling and am always worried because this caused the rod to lean against the blank between the spit grips  rather than the handle.   Could be a little over sensitive on this but I am always worried that I will crack the blank by doing this.

 

The reason I only epoxied half of the rod has more to do with logistics then time.  Right now I am working on a 6ft table and with the 76 rod  it was too far off the table for me to comfortably attempt to epoxy the threads.   Need to do some rearranging before I make another rod.

thanks!

2 hours ago, faygo1979 said:

The handle is actually 12 inches.  From the angle it does look a lot longer.  But I am actuality a fan of full grips.  I fish from a kayak and keep my rods in holders for trolling and am always worried because this caused the rod to lean against the blank between the spit grips  rather than the handle.   Could be a little over sensitive on this but I am always worried that I will crack the blank by doing this.

that's an interesting thought.  i fish from the yak and sometimes troll in the holders and never really thought about it....

nice looking rod though!

Metallic thread can be hard to handle.  What I do with the trim bands on the ends of the wrap with metallic thread is to use a nail knot, which works for 2 wraps or more.  I tie the knot, fit it up to the wrap, pull it tight one last time, trim it, then stabilize it with CP.  That won't work if you are using regular thread without cp as the cp on your nail knot  will contaminate your full wrap with cp.  In that case I use a 4 wrap nail knot just before epoxying (have all the wraps complete and ready for final finish, then do the nail knot as a last step on all the guides just before epoxying.

If you didn't use cp on this build you must have used non-cp thread to get the nice green, right?  If you want you can use regular thread without cp and you get a more transparent, quite different color than the original thread color.  You can evaluate what color you will get by doing a test wrap on the blank and wetting it with alcohol.  For example, on that blank you are using, a garnet without cp will turn a rich black cherry color, and with gold or silver metallic trim, looks quite nice.  The sky is the limit with custom buidls?  Another good forum is http://rodbuilding.org/list.php?2

Super nice first rod.  Much cleaner than my first for sure.

Im not that great. Yours looks really nice !

Looks really good.Nice job

Wraps are nice and tight, not huge and bulging. Full handle - my type of guy. 12 inches is a bit long for me though. I love the Rainshadow RX7 cranking blanks, they're very nice. 

Just thought of something, the slant on the ramp makes it difficult for me to do a good pull through without dragging the threads off the top.  Did you have trouble?  Any tip for me on how to handle it? thanks

Not to change the topic, but have you all seen the new rid building sub forum? Not sure how long it's been on but I just saw it. This will undoubtedly be moved there shortly. 

Really nice work, love the ramp.  

It looks a whole lot better than my first build! 

Look PDG to me, enjoy it.

Welcome to your new addiction of building rods:)
Excellent job on your first build, you’ve done better than I did (and I had guys in the office to teach me).

Look forward to seeing what you do next!