I have had this on my watch list since the beginning of the summer.
More curious than anything because I know nothing about the art of rod building.
The closest I have come is to replace a snake guide next to the ferrule on an FF84 and I was quite pleased to get a repair that is not noticeable when I am holding the rod. Brown on brown is pretty forgiving when it comes to color matching.
But it was on the back burner while I was pursuing other rods.

If you look at something enough times on certain sites, the seller might make you a discount offer. Eventually agreeing to what I believe was a fair price I bought it as a 65th birthday gift to myself. Cost a fraction of my monthly beer, bourbon and Red Bull budget,

But then the seller and I worried for 16 days while it was lost in the USPS system and I was going through my second bout with Covid.
Finally it showed up. And luckily the seller packed it securely in a stout cardboard tube inside a stout cardboard box stuffed with packing material.
The outside box looked like it jammed in a couple of conveyer belts but the rod was perfect.

The seller did not know anything about it, had it for awhile and never fished it.

I believe it is the FL-102-6F blank found in the 1982 Fenwick rod builders Catalog. But that portion of the label looks to have been removed.
Exactly two hits come up in a Google search with the rod builders name. Both for bamboo rods. One made for a Bob Burmeister.

I hope to cast it this weekend. But we have had high winds and steady rain for a week.

It came with an early style Long Beach brown sock with red thread, an early A series style reel seat, a close but not Fenwick cork grip. Beefier in the palm.
To my eyes, it looks like fine workmanship and there is not a scratch or nick on it that leads be to believe it never had a reel on it.

The only thing that is visually odd to me is the the meticulous hand printing is oriented 180 degrees from the Fenwick logo.

And lastly, I haven't the foggiest idea why someone would double up on the guides and space them like this.
Definitely going to be a conversation starter at the Holiday party at the fly club on Tuesday.

The stripper guides have nice gray inserts and the tip top has a black insert.

Any information would be greatly appreciated, and i do hope it casts well.
That is after all, the main reason I bought it.









Edit: I realized the original 2nd picture was a different rod and deleted. It was an actual A Series FF90

Guys, that must be a custom built rod for someone who knew what they wanted for a specific purpose.

The stripper with a tamer, and the guides doubled-up on both ends of the ferrule to reduce stress on it when fish-fighting, are extreme features of a rod built for big fish. Prior to the 21st century, fighting butts were for rods 7 weight and up, so no fighting butt. I was also taught that double wrapping the guide feet like that was preferred by West Coast builders to add extra strength at the guides. That hook keeper is ugly, but it works if you wrap the leader around the back of the reel. The hook is then facing back at you.

That rod is designed to fit the whims of one specific person. Most probably, someone along the West Coast?

I wouldn't read too much into those oddities. Whims with a purpose, probably,(as in the "tamer guide" concept) but not much. That's why people build rods. Now if somebody recognizes the builder's name or knew him, there might be some great stuff to tell. In some cases, oddities on custom builds mean nothing more than the builder had no idea what he was doing. Probably not in this case, but a purposeful experiment at best. Before somebody got screwing around with a more "standard" guide spacing--the Fenwick recommendations are posted in the "rod papers" section, so they were available to anybody in their time--he would figure some reason to vary them. Slightly adjusting the position of the stripping guide to an individual's reach, then the next one or two accordingly, would be normal. Much more than that--well it would be fun to know what he had in mind.

I can't see clearly enough to tell, but a common way of fabricating a hookkeeper was to bend-stretch a snake guide, probably one on that had had already been damaged out of shape anyhow and might as well be bent some more to be useful. Maybe you can tell.

Or an experiment unfinished. Looking at the recently posted fishing pic, one has to wonder if the builder had intended to eventually remove the original guides once the new guide positions were in place.

A very unusual approach to a redo, but maybe they prefer having very solid reference points for the new guide layout process.

Would be interesting to have a conversation with this builder, might have even been trying to alter the action a bit with extra bracing.

Regarding the builder's intent to remove, perhaps not as they may well have been more illustrative to a potential customer or simply for his own investigation. Your rod may not have even been intended for actual fishing use or to have all those guides incorporated all at once as you are doing. I took the liberty to mark-up your picture with the red arrows as one useable guide layout, the yellows another.


If you run your line through reds or yellows ONLY and then bend the rod as in the picture, you’ll see what the builder was doing. I think, anyway. Never seen a rod like this, but it could be very useful to illustrate just how various guide spacings work relative the blank. Pretty neat. Essentially, a functional multi-layout model all on the same blank.

Haven’t been online in a bit. I was down for 10 days with Covid and then 5 days with the Flu.

I believe that this is a fiberglass blank. It also has a Feralite label.
The F indicates it is Fenglass. I believe it was available in dark brown or yellow. The only other possible 9’ rod in that catalog is a med power light action Steelhead spinning rod blank.
I believe it is the FL-102-6F blank found in the 1982 Fenwick rod builders Catalog. But that portion of the label looks to have been removed.


[Note added: the 'FL' at the beginning of the model number indicates a fly rod and the 'F' at the end of the model number indicates a ferruled blank. Tom]

It's brown then?? Looks black in pictures, and I'm a bit challenged in that dept anyway.

I've had some dark brown Fenwick rods from blanks, all seemed just a tad faster that the typical Fenwick.

Can we get a better shot of that ferrule, with sections apart?? Is it tip over butt like your typical feralite?

I think Fenglass was a later rod.

I might be wrong about the Fenglass for this rod. Might be plain fiberglass. But has tip over but ferrule with Feralite logo on blank. But in 1982 there was Boron , Fenglass, fiberglass and HMG.







https://www.fishingtalks.com/fenwick-ro ... 16901.html

Having read the catalog closer, I now realize the -F designation is for Feralite 2pc rods. No -F, it’s a 1 pc. But the dark brown is what has me wondering. I do not have any other Fenwick this color. But this is the only one wrapped from a blank that I have also. As I go through the entire catalog, there are only a couple of rods that this could be based on the measurements. Really weird the way they measure the butt and tip diameters differently. But it might be typical for other manufacturers.
Also, it seems to me that the butt diameter is measured at the very end of the blank. So I would have to extrapolate what it should be at the front of the grip after determining in front.
Again, I have limited knowledge and zero experience in this area.

The Fenglass rods listed in the Wiki were a line of E-glass rods brought out by Fenwick around 2000. They looked similar to the the earlier Feralite glass, but made in China with heavier blanks. They were marketed as budget fly rods, but even then they didn't sell well. Glass had not revived yet. The more recent line of Fenglass were better designs and were received much better by the market. The more recent rods were made from an S2-glass material.



At least one forum member who knew the Fenwick design team has mentioned that S-glass fly rods were marketed in the late 70s and again in the late 80s, but the rods didn't sell well. S-glass fly rods are mentioned in Vic Johnson's Fenwick as well. I have not found any marketing material for them. Woodstream owned Fenwick during this period, so perhaps the marketing department only pushed the big product lines. In the late 70s Lamiglas, Sage, and Berkley also sold S-glass fly rods, but all the market wanted was graphite. These S-glass rods don't show up often.

I have a 1988 Fenwick blank catalog that only shows one fly rod blank made from Fenglass, a 9 foot, 12 weight. None of the other fly rod blanks are listed as Fenglass. However, that catalog was only valid for that year. For glass at Fenwick, the end was near. A couple years later, Fenwick did not have any glass fly rods in their product line.



On blanks the rod tips were measured in 64ths of an inch to match the sizing of tip tops. The rod butts were measured in decimal inches to match the sizing of reelseats and reelseat inserts.

So how can you definitively tell if a particular rod is made from S-glass? Sorry, I don't know of any non-destructive tests. So don't worry about it. If a rod isn't marked E-glass, or S-glass, or T-glass, just judge the rod on its own merits. If you like the way the rod performs, that should be all that matters.


Tom

FENGLASS trademark US Serial Number: 73260859 Application Filing Date: May 05, 1980
US Registration Number: 1196909 Registration Date: Jun. 01, 1982

Much more there than I want to look into, but easy to search as USPTO. Looks like Woodstream assigned the Trademark to Berkeley later on, for the sum of ONE dollar. So it wasn't worth much.

S glass wasn't unique to Fenwick, but I guess they had a name for the way they used it. You have to have a name for the same thing others use. S-glass was kind of a last gasp in the fiberglass day in brands as jgestar mentioned above, because its modulus (stiffness, essentially) is greater than E-glass. This didn't have much to do with making better fiberlgass rods, just making proven manufacture seem competitive with latest-greatest graphite, which had a new modulus every year or so for a while there. IM, IMplus. IM 3, . . . IM6 and whatever else someone could think up for "even stiffer than before" for the particular graphite prepreg they used.

Today, S glass has the same old modulus as ever, and some new technology and quality control in the form of S2 glass. In a way, its more viable now, appealing to people coming from graphite, because it is stiffer than E-glass, feeling a little more familiar. Better? That's for the user to say, but I never saw anything much better about it, any more than IM6 vs IM3 or plain old graphite as in the first good graphite rods on the market from makers like Scott and Fisher.

This one wasn't maintained either.

I had a 5-1/2' Lunkerstik 2000, new in 1977, matched with a Daiwa Millionaire 6H - both from Oshman's.
Thanks Tom, what you bring to the table is interesting in an otherwise more than curious thread.
BTW Steve, carbon prepreg is something relatively new.