Fly Blog

by Mark Waldin www.flycatcherinc.com Most fly fishermen choose an up locking reel seat when building a fly rod.  The hood of an up locking reel seat fits up into the cork grip.  If you use an uplocking reel seat you are going to have to counter sink the fly rod grip to accommodate it.  Most cork grips will be cored to 1/4 inch or 3/8 inch from the manufacturer.  The quickest way to countersink your grip is to use a hole saw and a drill.

Measure the diameter of the reel seat hood and select a hole saw 1/8 inch smaller.  By staying a bit smaller than the desired hole you can compensate for the fact that the hole saw will cut a relatively rough hole.

Measure the depth of the hood and wrap a piece of masking tape around the hole saw to mark the depth you want to cut.  Wrap masking tape around the drill bit in the hole saw so that the drill bit just slides snuggly into the existing bore in the fly rod grip.  This will keep the hole saw running true and keep the hole centered on the grip.

Sit on a chair and brace the drill between your legs or clamp drill into a vise.  With one hand turn the drill on to full speed.  With the other hand, guide the fly rod grip onto the drill bit and into the hole saw.  Run the hole saw down to the masking tape you put on earlier.

You will be left with a cork core that needs to be removed.  This can be chipped out by hand.  A good way to do it quickly is to use drill cutting bit 1/8 inch smaller than the hole saw (for example, for a 3/4 inch reel seat hood, use a 5/8 inch hole saw and 1/2 inch cutting bit).  Carefully drill out the core with this bit.

Wrap a piece of medium coarse sand paper around a 1/2 inch dowel and sand out the hole the remaining 1/8 inch so that the reel seat slides in snuggly without stretching the cork.

by Mark Waldin www.flycatcherinc.com –You probably connect your fly fishing tippet to your leader using a blood knot, don’t you? Did you know that a blood knot is going to break before your line breaks, meaning it is the weakest link?

According to tests done by Art Scheck and reported in his book, Practical Advice on Tackle, Methods, and Flies, the best knot to use for tying tippet to leader for tippet sized 3x and smaller is a ligature knot. In his tests the ligature knot resulted in breakage occurring in the line itself and resulted in line strength that was 50% stronger than the blood knot!

You can find an example of the ligature knot on the Knots web site under the alternate title surgeon’s reef knot.

A couple days ago I zero balance tuned two identical St Croix SCIII fly rod blanks. Same length, same weight, same model, even came in the same shipment. Different results. Optimal placement of the fly rod guides was different by almost an inch and a half with one rod needing all the guides shifted back toward the butt compared to the other. Distance between guides varied significantly as well.

Here were the number in inches from the tip:

Each individual fly rod blank has it’s own characteristic. Optimal performance is gained by treating each one separately and building the rod holistically. St Croix builds very nice rods but they build lots of rods. They can’t take the time to treat each blank as an individual. That is why custom rod builders like Flycatcher exist. That is why hobbiest craftsmen build there own fly rods.

The best way for a hobbiest to determine guide placement on a custom crafted rod is through Flycatcher’s Zero Balance rod tuning. Without access to that, then make sure you DO NOT use guide placement charts. They don’t work. Place the guides on the rod temporarily. String the line on the rod. Flex the rod and adjust the placement of each guide individually to get the line to follow the rod bend as best you can.

You can have a rod that beats the one’s available off the shelf.