This rod is something that I decided to go full on bling/eye catching/crazy with. Reason why is because it is a rod from some women that work with one of my best customers. He is retiring so they wanted a special gift for him, and since he already owns around 17 rods from me, to make this one special/different I really had to pull out all the stops and dress this one up to the hilt. They gave me full artistic go ahead on this one so here's what I did.

The blank is a 10ft 5wt 4pc deep purple in color. I went with a grip style that I just somewhat came up with that felt comfortable to the hand, I modeled the shape of it to be somewhat like a mini spey style front grip only in a 8" OAL. Used all brown burl, dark mix, burnt and rubberized corks. For the seat I used a black woven carbon fiber design and mounted it inverted so the reel would sit farther back on the rod to balance out the extra length of it being a 10ft'er. Also rather than doing the rod specs on the blank, I did them on the rear hood to add something different to the build. Used an aluminum knurled winding, Hopkins & Hollaway stripper and single foot chrome guides.

For the wraps, this is where it gets interesting. The main wraps I used a Metallic Burgundy, then about 3/16" wide metallic black next to that, then single turn trim bands on each side of the burgundy as well as in the center, then 4 turn trim on the end. Plus the entire 12" length from the winding check all the way forward is wrapped with a base layer of black thread, needless to say there was a lot of wrapping on this rod. I also did some single turn trim as measuring marks and added the actual length for each in inches to the blank out to 24" and my new company logo as well.

The inscription cracked me up when the customer told me what they wanted, it's from the women in the front office to the guy that's retiring as you can tell lol.















Steve