I recently acquired an old fly reel that came with my first good conditioned silk line. The line is tapered, burgundy in color, still subtle, and holds up well to a good a pull.

I think the line willl be a good candidate for a restoration. I found a few articles around the net, some of them say to soak the line in water far a few days, other say to wash with water and baking soda for just a few minutes. I'm just wondering if any of you guys have had success, and what method did you use.

Once clean, I was going to finish it off with a linseed oil mix, but haven't started out with the project yet.

How did you do it?

I pretty much used the same instructions Pearow posted, but instead of throwing the line into two paperbags like the author sugested, I tied some mono too each end, and strung it up between some trees in the back yard. I let the coats dry in the back yard during the day, and then would bring the line in before the evening and hung it loosely coiled from the basement rafters. I repeated the process every couple days (no set schedule), and just kept an eye on the forecast, and chose nice days to apply an additional coating. The whole process between washing, drying and applying the finish, letting the line dry again, and re coating a few times took me a few weeks. I'm not sure exactly when I started it all, but I took my time throughout the process, I applied about 4-5 coats of finish on the line, and then finished with two coats of mucilin applied on different days.

It sounds like more work than it was, since each coat only took me a few minutes. The only thing that took long was the drying process, and that was mostly passive.

I'm pretty sure the line had more of a red tint when I started (I could be wrong, it may have just been dirt, and I didn't take any before pictures) It is now definitely a brown color.



The line is tapered, but is spooled onto this spool backwards. I haven't fished it yet, but will get it onto a reel sometime soon.