Ok, well I am back from vacation and had a little bit of time yesterday to work on the rod again....
When I left off I had finished glueing up the bottom piece of the handle. Next step was to shape this piece. Ideally I had wanted to mount a short piece of rod onto a jacobs chuck and then slide the handle piece on to that. Kind of a free floating mandrel. Well the jacbos chuck wouldnt open up wide enough, and my three jaw chuck wouldnt close far enough so I decided I could just make one out of some scraps I had laying around. Here is the scrap wood mounted up in the lathe....
http://i168.photobucket.com/albums/u...drel_Stock.jpg
Next step was to turn this down to the proper size.....Since it was turned on the lathe it is perfectly centered and should give a nice true round handle.
http://i168.photobucket.com/albums/u...rel_Turned.jpg
The nice thing about doing it this way was that I was able to sand the mandrel down so that the fit was perfect. I was a little concerned about the wood breaking, but since I would only be applying light sanding pressure I figured it would be alright. Here is the bottom of the handle mounted on the wooden mandrel.
http://i168.photobucket.com/albums/u...andrel_Fit.jpg
I sanded this handle down just as I did the front part of the grip. It turned out pretty good. I like the looks of some of the handles with dramatic curves and profiles, but dont think they feel as good in the hand. This handle has a slight bit of shapelyness to it, but most importantly it fits my hand very nicely!
http://i168.photobucket.com/albums/u...ece_Turned.jpg
The regular cork I bought for this rod was supposedly FLOR grade, but my source was one of these major sporting goods retailers that also happens to sell some rod building components. Obvisouly not the best source for cork, but I had gift certs there so thought I would give it a try. Anyway long story short there are some pits in the cork that I felt were too deep to ignore. I like the look of some pits and streaks as I think it adds a little character, but I dont like ones deep enough that I have to worry about them chipping out at some time....here are some of the culprits....
http://i168.photobucket.com/albums/u...andle_Pits.jpg
I had heard of some people using this elmers golden oak wood filler to fill cork so I thought I would try that out since I had never used it before. Decided to try it out on a test piece before I committed to using it on my handle.....
http://i168.photobucket.com/albums/u...ork_Filler.jpg
http://i168.photobucket.com/albums/u...est_Filler.jpg
After wiping most of the material away with a damp cloth and then sanding the residue after drying I ended up with this. Looks pretty good. I think I will use it on the handle...
http://i168.photobucket.com/albums/u...t_Filler_2.jpg
Next step was to fit the pieces to the rod blank. The butt piece had already been reamed to size, so just had to ream out the reel seat and the front grip. Round file mounted ona hand drill can make quick work of this job....
http://i168.photobucket.com/albums/u...ing_Handle.jpg
The round file didnt quite enlarge the hole enough and looking at it I figured that one of my reamers was about the perfect size. So I mounted the reamer in the drill and began to ream it out more......I dont exactly know what happened but for some reason at one point inside the grip the grit on the reamer all decided to come off. I started to feel the handle bulging for some reason and tried to remove the reamer but disaster happened......
http://i168.photobucket.com/albums/u...e_Disaster.jpg
I guess I dont really understand why this happened like this....really bums me out. Never experienced this before, and of couse it happens on a larger handle (read more expensive!) My wife asked me if I could just glue it back together....I'm pretty sure if I try to clean out all the grit and glue it up it will look pretty bad....so I guess I will be making a new handle. Really bums me out because this handle was a perfect fit and felt really good in hand. Oh well, such is life. I am short 5 cork rings though so now I have to place and order and wait for it to get here.....serious delay in the project. I wont post photos of making the new handle as you've already seen how I do that.....hopefully this set back wont take too long to fix.
Yonks