Now that I have a few (dozen) rods under my belt, I have worked out some of the things that I found lacking in my original rod wrapper.


The first was size. The darn thing wasn't long enough and I never seemed to have enough support for the rod section I was working on. The base on the original was warped, too. I had a real "Rockin' Rod Wrapper". The next thing was thread handling. The Military rods can have as many as 32 color changes in one ribbon. There may be only 2 colors in that ribbon, but they switch 32 times. Most ribbons have 4 colors or so and they change 10-20 times. That was a lot of spool changes. I had to come up with a new thread handling system. I was limited to regular spools, too. I couldn't use any of the cone type spools due to my tensioning system. Lastly, I wanted the option of motorizing things.


Here is what I came up with. I have wrapped a couple of rods by hand on it and like it a lot. The thread handling is much smoother and I can have 4 colors ready to go at any given time. Swapping those for another color takes a very short time.


The base is 48" long and has 4 supports when using it as a hand wrapper. One support on each side has hooks to put a mini bungie cord on to hold the blank down if need be.


The bench is a mess. It is that way all the time.








The really cool part is the headstock to my rod lathe. I went to Goodwill and picked up an old sewing machine for $10, took the motor and foot pedal out of it and will recycle the rest. I was having trouble finding an upper pulley so I turned one from some Delrin like plastic I had. The center hole was drilled slightly under size and the shaft, .25" stainless rod from the K&S racks I like so much, was pressed in. The chuck is a 1.5" PVC plumbing cap that I center bored and epoxied a shaft collar on to fasten it to the shaft. The shaft spins in a bronze bushing in the upright and has nylon thrust washers on either side of the upright. The belt is a largish o-ring. The headstock is removable to get it out of the way if necessary and can slide along the base like the supports.