Thank you for all the tips for best way to get transparent guides. I used the FC lite combo with denatured alcohol and it worked really well. Brad you were so right about WAY too much was put on the first time! I even tried wrapping the guide on top of an NCP navy thread with natural silk and it came out okay!

I would post pics if I knew how!

Thanks again. This is a great forum!

What a smart way to just use a pen to draw the one single line. Brilliant!


I assume a variety of Pigma colors would work not just black?

The next thing were're going to be talking about is feather inlays on top of weaves. Stop the madness now.

Well a moderator can't stop all the madness or we wouldn't be having any fun. I will insist, Carlz, that before you start a thread on feather inlays, you establish the etiology of the feather inlay. I can't see much point in discussing how to do something until we know why anyone would want to. I put that right up there with snowshoe webbing wrapped on Fenwicks, which has always been an inkblot to me.

Oh sure, we do some things because we can, but that just shifts the logical fallacy to a faulty judgment of causation; to wit, given that we can do something, it does not follow that we should do it. In most cases, it would be more valid to conclude that we shouldn't.

We could get it on with Sharpie vs. Bic Permanent marker vs. modeling paint, vs nail polish. Vs. not coloring guide feet, viz, feet au naturale.

If you put alignment dots on the guide side of a fly rod where you can't see them when using the rod, and you put the rod together by visually aligning the guides same as all your other rods, are the alignment dots there?

planning a build this winter, may yet include a single iridescent blue pheasant head feather inlay there somewhere.. for a variety of reasons,
- one of my standard soft hackles is ostrich grey body, silver rib, iridescent blue starling or pheasant as hackle, caught so many fish in so many countries on that fly
- pheasants are beautiful and it makes me think of them
- I've killed numbers of them and the feather inlay would make me think..



agree the snowshoe webbing looks very 70s custom-build, lime green shag carpet, big hair, kind of vibe..