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Post 22 Oct 2021, 19:32 • #1 
Sport
Joined: 04/20/20
Posts: 98
Location: Springfield, PA


INTRODUCTION

Back in August I happened upon an SA System 5 rod that looked like it spent its previous life being fished hard and mistreated between stream visits. Even with that, I couldn’t pass it by, what with all the love that rod gets here (and the asking price being less than a lunch and a beer).

I posted about it here when I was looking for advice on how to bring it back to life:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=72590

Based partly on that feedback (thanks everyone) I decided to make this rod a skills-sharpening project for me, try some things I hadn’t done before, and add a few tools to my rod-building toolbox. Here’s a few more ‘after’ pix:



I’m creating this relatively lengthy post and adding details about some of my key undertakings (stripping and re-coating the blank, matching the factory grip, replicating the factory markings, etc.) with the hopes that other novice rod builders can mine something out of it that they can use to polish their own process.

Final note here: what I’m presenting with pix below is obviously a selection of photos I took along the way. What you may not glean directly from them is all the tries and re-tries that happened along the way (I must have citrus stripped the blank seven different times).



ASSESSING CONDITION AND SETTING A PLAN

Looking the blank over carefully, I knew right away that if my goal was to simply get it fishing, all I would really need to do would be to completely re-wrap the rod and open the ferrule gap along the way; both are things I’ve done before so I wasn’t too concerned about them.

- The reel seat and grip, although showing signs of heavy use, were in pretty sound condition.

- The ferrule had no gap remaining (and IMO was bottomed out and still too loose to consider a bees wax fix) but showed no signs of being compromised in any way – no evidence of cracks or splits.

- Surface condition of the blank was really rough and blistered from one end to the other but no deep gouges, scratches, or other characteristics that were a concern.

- When I struck the butt section sharply on my hand, it gave off a vibration that reminded me of a cracked wooden baseball bat. That concerned me because I simply couldn’t piece together what was going on. I’ll explain what I found in one of the follow-on sections.

- All brightwork including the original Mildrum carbide stripping guide were in good enough shape to be reused if I wanted to (I did reuse the original Mildrum SG, winding check, and hook keeper). Here's a few 'before' photos of the rod's condition:



Based on that, here was my plan:

1. Photo document the original rod and take very good measurements of everything: guide spacing, wrap lengths, factory marking locations, character spacing, the works.

2. Replicate the grip. I haven’t turned cork yet so if I couldn’t match the factory grip to my satisfaction, I’d leave it in-place and just do a little cleaning and filling where needed.

3. Try source an original reel seat. Same as the grip – if I couldn’t find something that matched the original, I’d just leave the factory one installed and work around it.

4. Come up with a plan to re-produce the factory markings, relying on as much of what I was able to make out from the faded original. If I wasn’t confident that I could get close, I’d just retain the original markings by preserving them throughout the rest of the rebuild.

5. Strip, re-mark, and re-finish the blank.

6. Standard grip and reel seat install (if required).

7. Standard re-wrap and varnish.



MIRRORING THE GRIP

I had never turned cork before and like bathroom tile work, for some unknown reason it’s always intimidated me. I figured this would be a good opportunity to take the first “half-step” toward turning cork since the 5’s factory grip is a very basic, symmetrical cigar.

I say “half-step” because I decided to start with a high quality pre-formed grip of similar shape. I modified my 8” benchtop drill press slightly to operate kind of like a vertical lathe and refined the shape of the off-the-shelf grip to get it where I wanted it to be. Here’s a pic of the original next to my finished replacement:



To turn this on my drill press, I ended up making a very basic bottom plate that attached to base of the press. It’s nothing more than a scrap piece of hobby oak, a roller skate bearing I popped out of one of my kid’s fidget spinners (they can also be bought on auction sites and usually don’t cost more than a couple of bucks for a 10-pack), and a few bolts, washers, and wing nuts I dug out of a coffee can.



If you’re buying bearings, select ones with a sealed race (the ones with the plastic covers over the balls) since all of your cork dust is going to land right on it. My mandrel was a section of a fiberglass rod I originally sourced from Granger to have some stent stock laying around. That particular one happened to match the ID of the off-the-shelf grip perfectly and just needed a few tape rounds where it interfaced with the bearing. I cut other mandrels from roadside reflector posts I trash-picked that work just as well, depending on your cork ID. Here’s one more pic of my setup that, if I had to source everything except the drill press itself, would probably be less than $20.00:



In the end, I got the results I was looking for and I don’t know why I was so intimidated by cork in the first place. Here’s a little feedback: depending on the sandpaper grit you’re using, cork cuts pretty quick. I think I started with 600 and moved up to 800 for final shaping. I adjusted my drill press speed to about 1,720 rpm.

First intersection on my decision tree was behind me: I liked the way my grip turned out so factory grip was marked for removal and will be replaced with new.

My sincere apologies to all you gray beards who think starting with a pre-formed grip is cheating and thanks for reading at least this far. :)



REPLICATING THE REEL SEAT

This one should have been pretty straight-forward. All I needed to do is find a vintage aluminum reel seat of the right color, configuration, and length. I got two out of the three. Turns out a Varmac RSV01 is a near-dead ringer for the factory seat except it’s exactly 1/2” longer than what SA outfitted these rods with. Rick’s Rods had NOS on-hand for $6.00 and I had one a couple of days after placing a quick order with Marylin on the phone.

Right color. Right style. Right ID. Only 1/2” longer. Easy decision here, right? Well, not so fast. I was bothered enough by the half inch difference enough that I decided to over-complicate things by heating off the end foot ring, shortening the length to match the factory, and epoxying it back together.



Well, sounds a little complicated but it really took no real effort. I made a slide hammer out of a piece of scrap wood by simply drilling a hole of the right diameter in it, put a little heat on the reel seat end, knocked the foot ring off, cut off a 1/2” with a pipe cutter, and epoxied it back together with JB Weld.



I found myself sleeping much better knowing that I wasn’t extending the rod’s factory length by 1/2”. Joking aside, clearly I could have left it as-is . . . and even left the original seat in-place, but my goal of restoring the factory rod to as near original specs as possible just wouldn’t let me do it. Keep in mind, one of my primary objectives was to get a little smarter on rod rebuilding and that’s really what put me on the somewhat trivial reel seat cutting path.

Regardless, I was thru the second intersection on my decision tree: factory seat comes off and will be replaced with modified NOS.



REPRODUCING THE FACTORY MARKINGS

I wanted to reproduce the factory markings as close to stock as possible and I really didn’t know where to begin. I took some advice early on that kept bringing me back to “leave them as-found and protect what’s left with tape”. Sound advice, but I kept looking for alternatives. All things considered, there’s not a lot of pictures of system 5 rods on the web and there’s even fewer pictures out there of the old school SA logos that were printed them.

What I did stumble on was a number of auction site sellers selling good quality SA System magazine ads from the 70’s and 80’s that were crisp enough a collector could frame them. One of those with the right logo, along with rod pix (mostly from threads on this site), the faded remnants of my rod’s markings, and mad Photoshop skills, I thought I had what I needed to reproduce the factory markings pretty closely. I purchased a magazine page that contained the right logos and fonts, scanned it into Photoshop, and used scale measurements from my rod blank to size and space everything as close to the original as possible.



What was left to figure out was how to get it from laptop to rod blank. I though the cleanest way would be a custom dry transfer. I figured if I can match the marking’s color (a nothing-special-silver), that should allow me to land new markings without the thickness of sticker. I figured I can protect the dry transfer with a spray coat or two of poly acrylic and top it off with spar.

I stumbled across Reprographix online (https://customrubontransfers.com/) and decided to give them a try. I uploaded my dry transfer template to their web site and waited patiently for the transfers to show up before doing anything else with the blank (their sales model for custom work is standard transfer creation and shipping takes several weeks unless you pay a premium for priority service, which I didn’t think was necessary for this project). When the transfer showed up I was blown away by how crisp the art was and how well the actual product matched my template’s intended scale.



Bottom line here is I couldn’t have been happier with the results. The transfer to the round blank was a little tricky until I got the hang of it – I needed 3-4 tries before I was happy with the results – a little wrinkle here, a little tilted there – but the quantity I had on my sheet was way more than I needed (I still have quite a few of these left to repair any unplanned stream-side scratches that find their way across it).



Full transparency, the cost of the magazine ad, the custom dry transfer, and all associated S&H was actually more than the cost of the used rod itself (which again, I didn’t pay a lot for). Worth it? For this project absolutely and looking forward, I can see this being cost effective for anyone getting into rod building and planning to build out a bunch of rods that will have the same signature or logo or marking on it. If that’s you, I suggest you explore this option a little further.

This was the third and final intersection on my decision tree before focusing on stripping the blank: factory markings come off and will be replaced with new.



STRIPPING THE BLANK

Preps for stripping the blank included cutting off the guides and grip, putting a little heat into the seat to slide it off, and addressing the ferrule gap; all pretty standard re-build activities.



Once those steps were done, I was ready to strip the bubbled finish from the blank and start building it back up. I covered the spigot and factory paper seat shim/arbor with tape for a little extra protection (since I intended to reuse the paper shim) and laid the Citrus Strip (CS) on thick.



This was the first time I was using CS on a rod blank and considering its condition, I expected to be chipping away at whatever the bubbled coating was with my fingernail for quite some time. Turns out that when it comes to vintage glass blanks, Citrus Strip is PFM in a bottle. A good, liberal coat of the blank with CS and a foil wrap overnight resulted in an unbelievably clean and consistently smooth blank. I was absolutely amazed at how easy it was to get the blank to a place that I can start applying a varnish to it after a good wipe-down. Paper towels at first to get all of the CS off and then with a DN alcohol-soaked rag to make sure I wasn’t leaving anything behind.

To my pleasant surprise the finish state of the blank contained “witness marks” where all the wraps were. That made it very easy to replicate the guide locations and factory wrap lengths. I had the detailed measurements but didn’t really need them – even after re-coating the blank.



Before moving on to re-coating the blank, let’s go back to the butt section rattle I mentioned in the opening post. I now found myself holding a cleanly stripped blank. Everything left (spigot and spacer) was intact and tight but the rattle was still there with every sharp strike on my hand. I figured if the blank was split and I just wasn’t seeing it, I had nothing to loose by straightening out a wire hanger and ‘checking the bore’ with it. I carefully run the hanger up the bore with a slight roto-router twisting motion and what I ended up doing was breaking free two long bead sections of epoxy that together ran along nearly the entire longitudinal length of the butt section. They were obviously partially loose and flapping around inside and causing the vibration. Once I liberated them, no more vibration.



Based on the appearance of the epoxy beads, it got me thinking about spines. Is it possible that instead of a manufacturer taking the time to spine every rod, they could simply wrap the rod to align with wherever their stamped markings ended up and then 'create' a spine by introducing an epoxy bead behind the guides? Or is it likely nothing more than an artifact left behind when they set the spigot? It just looked too long, too consistent, and too thick to be a function of the spigot glue.

Just a thought. BTW: I spined both section before landing a guide.



REFINISHING THE BLANK

Okay, pay attention here. There’s only one thing you really need to know about refinishing a clean vintage blank: having ‘Curves in all the Right Places’ is all you really need. I know what you’re thinking: you’ve heard that before; but I’m guessing with slightly different context. “Curves in all the Right Places” is the brand of cosmetic sponges Rite-Aid carries.



I made the mental note of using cosmetic sponges to apply consistently thin coats of varnish after reading about it in a different thread, possibly on a different forum, and since I had a 'blank' slate, I decided to give it a try.

It did take a little getting used to but once you find your glide, the little brightly colored sponges do an unbelievably consistent job of applying varnish in thin coats. What I worked out with a little trial and error was to poke a right-sized hole in the middle of the sponge (something that passes down the entire blank section with little pressure), put a small amount of finish on it (I was using spar), and run it down the blank in one continuous motion without stopping.



I would usually make two quick passes, top to bottom, and then hang the rod section from a nail overnight to dry. I landed the tip top on my top section to act as a handle/hanger and I taped a wire loop to the spigot of the butt section to hang it.

Extremely impressive results that allowed me to avoid a fight with my wife over the potential risks to kids, dogs, furniture, carpet, etc. that came with a pipe full of varnish and a wench (a la dip tank).

The sponges did take some getting used to. The size of the hole is key – too small and the sponge will drag and leave little foam fragments behind that if you hold the rod at arm’s length, actually spell the words “do it again”. Too big and you leave a reverse snail trail behind – dry spots here and there that will require re-coating.

Something else to keep in mind is you have to allow adequate dry time between coats or the tackiness of the last coat will result in the same sponge-fragment-sticking-in-your-finish result. Took me a little while to figure that out but once I did, results were exceptional.

I finished the bare blank with three-ish coats applied a full day apart, I lightly scuffed the final coat with 1500 grit where I was going to be putting the dry transfers, applied the transfers, followed it with two thin coats of spray poly acrylic, scuffed it again, and sponged two more coats of spar over everything.



Another tip: Be sure to let your spar dry completely before wrapping and finishing. It’s thin enough that if you don’t, the felt from your rod wrapping setup will actually dull it while you’re rotating the blank during wrapping and finish coating. If that happens, no worries. Just grab another sponge, add a couple drops of spar to it and do a local touch-up.



RE-WRAPPING THE GUIDES

Providing some discussion on what I tried and didn’t work below but let me spoil it for you right now: Pro Wrap 710 (Bees Wax) CP with 5 coats of Al’s Color-Rite and Gudebrod 290 NOCP for the light accent bands.



I feel like I invested a lot of time trying to match thread color to the factory thread. I collected everything I cut off and kept it as my thread color baseline. I had a lot of browns – both CP and NOCP – and picked up a couple of new spools based on discussion/advice here and on other forums. I’ve added a couple of pix below of some of the trials I did while I was waiting for something to dry or get delivered.



Here’s my bottom lines:

(1) Like others have suggested, Gudebrod 541 is just too brown and IMO not a good match for the factory thread. Most other Gudebrod light browns didn’t work for me either.

(2) Regardless of manufacturer (Gudebrod, Pro Wrap, and Fuji), nothing NOCP worked for me. Although I prefer NOCP when I’m wrapping a new build most times, it just didn’t have a ‘shimmer’ that matched the vintage thread. The only very notable exception was that I used Gudebrod 290 NOCP for the light accent bands. By my eye, that was a dead-on replacement for the light almond factory wraps.

(3) Of everything that I experimented with, Pro Wrap 704 (Midas Gold) and 710 (Bees Wax) CP were the best choices – the two most yellow leaning color choices on Pro Wrap’s brown pallet.

A couple of missteps here: I actually wrapped the entire rod out first with Pro Wrap 722 (Almond) NOCP, followed by a re-wrap using 704 (Midas Gold) CP before my third re-wrap with 710 (Bees Wax) CP finally scratched the color match itch.

The 722 NOCP was the closest color match to the original thread but just looked ugly once I started coating it.



The 704 looked good but was a little light for me once I started coating it with spar. I would’ve absolutely lived with it but what I didn’t expect was how little I knew about properly applying color preserver. Everything bled thru the 704 CP wraps and it required me to cut them off and start over. It turned out to be a bit of a blessing in disguise, I guess because that's when I landed the 710 CP spool on my thread carriage instead.

As soon as I saw it coated, I knew the 710 CP was the right choice and looking at the finished rod, I think it’s really close to the factory color I started with.



VARNISH AND COLOR PRESERVER AND ALL THAT

The 704 bleed-thru I mentioned in the post above had, without a doubt, nothing to do with the CP I chose, or the thread I was using and everything to do with how I was applying it.



I wasn’t hitting the mark with 2-3 coats (even with nylon) and I realized I just simply wasn’t saturating the wraps enough or giving the tunnels the attention they deserved. Once I figured that out, I gave my CP application much more respect.
The method I settled on was 5 coats of Al’s Color Rite. This is how that rolled: Wrap and pack your thread before applying your first coat of CP (seems obvious – I learned a lesson here). I heated up water in a measuring cup and gave my bottle of CP a warm water bath while I was prepping my workspace. Shake well. I rotated the rod and very liberally gobbed the stuff on the wraps as I worked from one end of the rod blank to the other.

For the tunnels, I now use a piece of stiff sighter mono to help pull the CP in to them.



As you work down the blank three or four guides (6 or 8 wraps) you’ll notice the consistency of the gobbed-up CP thicken a little where you started. At that point I go back to the start with a second, clean brush and knock off the excess. I keep working up the rod to the end following the same process. 6 hours between coats. 24 hour dry time for the last coat before applying finish.



I was initially concerned because even after heating and shaking the hell out of my CP, I’d describe the consistency and appearance of it as curdled milk. I guess that's normal because the results were fantastic.

Here’s a tip that should obvious to most: do all your packing and thread adjustments before you apply CP. If you find yourself needing to dig at a wrap with a burnish tool to thread pick after CP, consider that wrap’s CP coat count back at zero. That lesson learned: I decided to try to make a thread pick adjustments to two of my light accent wraps after applying CP. Both showed bleeds where I monkeyed with them. They were the only bleeds I experienced and the ironic thing about them was the light accent wrap thread was NOCP thread to begin with, with additional CP on top of them. Still, be sure to re-coat anything you find yourself making a late adjustment to.  





FINAL THOUGHTS

I’m really glad I headed down this path and I couldn’t be happier with the results. I was able to gain some additional confidence with some rod building steps I hadn’t tackled before and I am soooo happy to be adding a System 5 to my rotation. I’m not done fishing this year but it deserves some conservative cure time so realistically I'll be stringing this one up early next spring.

I appreciate all of the input and feedback other forum members have given me – directly and indirectly – along my rod-building journey and I relay hope others can pull something useful from this thread. Time writing this will be well-spent if it gets others thinking about solutions to their rod building challenges a little differently.

Like I said in the beginning, I’m not talking about all the mis-steps and re-work but I did take pix of everything along the way. If you’re interested in browsing my full set of rebuild pix, send me a PM and I’m happy to drop you a link to the album.

Good luck with your next project! I hope this helps somehow!

//Jeff



Last edited by jeffroey on 23 Oct 2021, 09:44, edited 1 time in total.

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Post 22 Oct 2021, 21:39 • #2 
Master Guide
Joined: 11/11/13
Posts: 774
Location: US-CA
Jeff, that must have been a lot of fun. You did an outstanding job the rod looks great. Well done!!!!!

Lanny


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Post 22 Oct 2021, 22:37 • #3 
Glass Fanatic
Joined: 12/31/15
Posts: 1238
Location: Northern Rockies
Wow. This turned out fantastic. You’ve given me several good ideas for my next project. I really like your system with the drill press for turning cork. I use a drill press too, but this looks like it will solve the problems I’ve been having.


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Post 23 Oct 2021, 05:01 • #4 
Master Guide
Joined: 08/14/06
Posts: 366
Location: US-TN
Outstanding work! The rub-on decals are blowing my mind as it the thread match.

Question: What is Gudebrod 241? I can't remember encountering it.

--Rich


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Post 23 Oct 2021, 06:04 • #5 
Glass Fanatic
Joined: 04/20/07
Posts: 8920
Location: US-ME
That's it ! A pleasure to look over, and it sure will inspire others. Thanks for such a carefully laid out account of the process.


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Post 23 Oct 2021, 07:03 • #6 
Master Guide
Joined: 02/01/12
Posts: 900
Location: Upstate NY
That came out really nice!


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Post 23 Oct 2021, 09:13 • #7 
Glass Fanatic
Joined: 02/26/14
Posts: 3578
Location: US-MN
Awesome job and thanks for taking us through the process - lots of good tips there!


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Post 23 Oct 2021, 09:55 • #8 
Sport
Joined: 04/20/20
Posts: 98
Location: Springfield, PA
Thx to everyone for your initial feedback!

eastprong wrote:
Question: What is Gudebrod 241? I can't remember encountering it.

--Rich

I'm so glad you asked this question Rich! It prompted to go downstairs and take the two pix I'm attaching below. I quickly realized I made a mistake in my initial narrative. My light color thread choice was Gudebrod 290 (Tan) My ref to 241 was an error that I've since corrected in the original post. Everything I've seen refers to 290 as tan or camel but my spool is really light - more like an almond or cream to me.

Here's two pix of the threads I mentioned in the original post stacked up against each other. The spool on the far left is a Gudebrod CP light brown I considered as well but the styro spool doesn't have a number stamped on it. BTW: all thread is size 'A'.



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Post 23 Oct 2021, 10:37 • #9 
Guide
Joined: 09/11/19
Posts: 134
Location: Canada, Alberta
Epic thread!
Amazing job! You have inspired me to potentially do the same to a classic blank. The attention to detail is amazing.
That now for putting so much work into the thread!


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Post 23 Oct 2021, 15:40 • #10 
Glass Fanatic
Joined: 05/19/14
Posts: 3924
Location: USA - Illinois
Epic thread!
Amazing job!

Yes Sir, well said!!!

A great thread by the OP that will serve as reference down the road.


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Post 23 Oct 2021, 20:05 • #11 
Master Guide
Joined: 08/14/06
Posts: 366
Location: US-TN
When I refinished an SA System, I too used Gudebrod #290 as the lighter trim wrap. I had a heck of a time on the main wrap and settled on a Belding Corticelli silk #5475 with CP. It was close but not as close as yours! So into the notebook your fabulous work goes.

--Rich


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Post 23 Oct 2021, 23:48 • #12 
Guide
Joined: 02/25/08
Posts: 184
Location: US-NM
That is a fantastic job!


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Post 26 Oct 2021, 18:36 • #13 
Sport
Joined: 05/14/18
Posts: 75
Location: FT Irwin CA
Thanks so much for posting this and with the pics and explanations also. As a guy just about to enter the world of building my own rods from a blank, this post any the many others like it on the forum are invaluable! Thanks again.


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Post 26 Oct 2021, 21:41 • #14 
Master Guide
Joined: 04/20/17
Posts: 387
Location: Portland, OR
Woah...not sure what's more impressive, the rebuild or the documentation and write up...either way...thank you...even less than a rewrap novice (like me) could follow along. Made me think about maybe doing that to my System 6 because of such good instruction...but as a wise whirlpool told me, don't start with a System 6!

Sandman


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