Recently picked up a Crown bamboo fly rod off Ebay. Rod was in decent shape and fishable except for a loose ferrule on the butt end and a couple wraps that were coming unwrapped - all on the butt. So, I figure this would be a good learning experience with bamboo, varnish, etc.
Well I glued up the loose ferrule with Rodbond, purchased a quart of Man-o-war spar varnish as well as some Gudebrod nylon “classic twist” thread green/black as it closely matched the older wraps on the other rod sections. The wraps came out nicely packed and I was excited to get the varnish applied.
Took some varnish and put it in a clean glass jar with about 25% naptha to thin it some and applied the 1st coat with a fairly stiff brush and only enough to ‘wet’ the thread wraps.
The wraps turned almost BLACK!! No visibility of the twist. I could approximate the same look with electricians tape! I did NOT use CP.
I see pics on this board (and others) with wraps that are just beautiful and while I can understand I may not get that same level of results I can’t believe my results would be so different.
I’ll be cutting off these wraps and starting again but not before I figure out where I went wrong. Suggestions?
That’s the reason right there. The thread will darken if no CP is used and the two tone in the classic twist won’t show up. It darkens a lot with Threadmaster or Flexcoat finish but sounds like Varnish has an even more drastic affect on it. Need to CP the wraps to hold the colors.
Always test a wrap before hand if your doing a color or finish you havent tried before, it will save you having to cut&redo the whole rod.
I thought varnish would make the threads more “translucent” than darken with varnish or is that only with silk?
You’re right about the testing - I’ve got a scrap piece of bamboo and will apply some wraps to it and play around with the varnish both on nylon and silk threads using CP and not using CP.
Before anybody else jumps in , what Steve said is…expert advice!..Ed
PS skondolf…dont feel too bad .all you did is make a common mistake , and it can be corrected . It is great you shared this though , it very well may help others out in the future.
It does make them more translucent, but it also has a bit of a darkening affect as well when the thread soaks up the varnish. I did the same thing the first time I used Classic twist without CP and wondered what happened to the “twist” colors. It was still slightly there, but turned very dark. So now Classic twist is one of the only thread I make sure to use CP with.
Using varnish, there is only one way to find out what the final result will look like. Do test wraps. The final color depends not only on the thread type or color but also the blank color (flamed, blonde, etc) when the wraps go translucent the blank shows through to some extent. It seems to me that the darker the original thread color, the greater the darkening effect of the varnish. At least with silk.
CP brings its own set of problems. You must make sure that every bit of thread is saturated with CP or the wrap will go blotchy when the varnish hits the spots that didn’t get enough. Common problems are not getting the CP into the gap beside the guide foot or not letting it flow over the edge onto the blank slightly. It may take as many as three coats of CP to seal everything up.
Just try everything before committing to the final selection.
Thanks everyone. I’ve done 2 sets of test wraps for each thread and will apply CP to one of each wrap and leave the other alone. Then apply the varnish and see what the differences are.
I currently have U40 Color Lock so I’ll see how that works. I’ll try to make sure the thread is fully saturated with the cp.
Sheesh! Maybe I should go back to graphite!!! Only kidding.
I’ve done the test wraps on a piece of bamboo and have applied 2 coats of U40 CP to them. The CP still darkens the wraps - certainly not as drastic as my original problem but still darkened nevertheless. I can still see the twist pattern but it’s definitely not as pronounced as when the wraps were first applied. This happened on both the silk and nylon test wraps.
Is it normal for CP to darken the thread some? I don’t remember this happening when applying CP on my graphite builds. Can CP go bad? Should I thin it somehow?
CP shouldn’t turn the nylon classic twist much darker at all. It will look darker while its wet with CP but after a few hours when it dries it should be pretty much the same color as it was on the spool. So look and see how it looks when its dry.
Silk on the other hand does weird things when certain CP’s are put on it. I’ve had green silk turn black from flex coat CP, and yellow silk turn transparent from CP. For silk threads Al’s wrap rite CP seems to be one of the better ones to use for it to hold color without issues.
Anything will probably go bad over time, but CP should last a long time. I’ve got a bottle I’ve had for 4 yrs that still works good. I wouldnt thin the CP at all IMO.
The rod has a green/teal colored twist thread for the wraps so I was trying to get close with the Gudebrod classic twist green/black thread. I don’t know if the original wraps are silk or not. I don’t think I can go with a lighter thread and let it darken with the varnish.
I did check the thread with the CP already dry. However I noticed the cap had cracked and possibly air got into it. It seems fairly thick; thicker than I remember when I first bought it which was the reason I asked about adding water.
I’m going to play around with some test wraps with different silk threads I have. If I find something I like (I’m sure I will) I’ll probably just cut off the original thread and re-wrap with silk. The rod is an old, cheap, production rod so there’s no danger in losing any value by removing the original wraps - in fact I think the rod will look much better once re-wrapped.
All of this was/is/continues to be a learning experience.
Only kidding. 
