The repair is complete. Thanks to all for the input and recommendations. I am like most of the lurking readers on the site - blessed with 10 thumbs, limited rod-building experience and only basic tools. I don't contribute much since I have so little to contribute, but I do benefit from the discussions that those with great knowledge and experience have in these forums and from the advice that is given so freely on the site when a question is asked. I only lost an inch of the blank (two inches measuring from the end of the tip top), so maintaining "bend" in the blank wasn't, I thought, much of an issue. Even if piano wire or something really malleable was used, it was going to be epoxied into the blank and would probably wind up stiff as a poker. I had a finishing nail that fit the blank well and that could have been used as a splint if I ground down the head and roughed up the finish, but I was curious about the spring steel and figured that if I had it to play with I could experiment a little and maybe learn something. Chose a spring that was larger and didn't have as tight a coil as a smaller spring (easier to straighten, I figured). The spring steel had a diameter that was smaller than the finishing nail, so I needed to do a thread wrap, tapering the wrap a bit to make it as snug a fit as I could. An issue with the spring was straightening the steel, which had been coiled and had a lot of memory. I wound up boring a small hole in a wood block and drawing the spring wire through it (several times) to try to remove the natural bend. After fiddling with it for quite a while I finally had a reasonably straight section. I wrapped a two-inch section of the steel and lightly epoxied it just to see how it would behave. The next day I had something that might have had a little more life to it than a nail, but in a short length probably wasn't much different. I used a Dremel cut-off wheel and ultra fine wet/dry sandpaper to clean up the ends of the blank where the break had occurred. I wrapped another section of the straightened spring steel, ground the tips to remove the sharp ends and burrs, and glued it into the broken tip section leaving a half inch exposed. The next day I inserted the half-inch piece into the blank, taped it in place, and lined the rod. There was a difference to the cast, but not much, and I'll really have to fish the rod for a while to identify just what the difference is and whether it matters to me. For now, its close enough to try, so I glued the tip in place. The seam is almost invisible, so I won’t bother with a wrap. If I’m not satisfied with the rod’s action after fishing it for a while, then next winter I'll cut off the tip at the repair seam, mount a new tiptop at that point, and reposition the guides on the tip section. And I'll cruise the EB ads looking for an FF70 with a trashed butt but good top. (That sentence should probably be rewritten). After gluing everything up, it occurred to me that the spring steel splint could have been wrapped in “bumps.” Too late to try it, but a thread wrap could have been placed at the ends of the wire section, and then more bumps could have been added along its length, leaving some bare wire exposed between the bumps. If epoxied lightly into the blank, that should have allowed the splint to flex while still gripping the walls of the blank.
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