I just finished building this Kabuto 7033 in white. I'm very impressed with the quality and action of this blank. One of the nicest rod blanks I've handled. Of all of the white Kabuto builds that I've seen two stood out as being the most attractive: Matt's build with pale yellow wraps and antique gold accents and Vlad's build with gold wraps and red accents. I thought long and hard about my options and decided to follow one of these two color schemes.

I was originally going to go with Vlad's color scheme and use antique gold wraps tipped in red. I turned an osage orange insert amongst a few others, and I had difficulty matching a wood insert with my test wrap.

Then I happened upon a nice piece of spalted box elder burl that I really liked. I turned it and immediately knew that it would match the pale yellow wraps that Matt used on his build.

I finally settled on the following components:

SEAT: Lemke down locking darkened nickel silver slide band
INSERT: Spalted box elder burl
GRIP: REC cork rings
STRIPPING GUIDE: REC Black Pearl #8
GUIDES and TIP TOP: black nickel snake brand
THREAD: 3/0 YLI Pale Yellow tipped with 3/0 YLI Antique Gold
FINISH: PacBay two part epoxy finish. One coat.

Here are some photos with a few different reels.