Got some guides done.

     I’ve been working on my fly rod yesterday and today.  I mounted the guides onto my fly rod with the thread.  Nice choice of colors, brown and gold.  I used the gold thread to highlight the brown and it turned out nice.  The guides that I decided to use are also gold so it worked out great.

     Last night after I finished threading the guides I put on three coats of color preserver and set them down to dry overnight.

     In the morning I loaded my ghetto mixer with some epoxy and started it going.  I let the epoxy mix five minutes.  My ghetto mixer is nothing more than a Craftsman cordless drill held up in a wooden bracket I whipped up from scrap pine I had from a previous project.  I drilled a 1/4” hole in the bottom of one of the plastic glasses I use for mixing epoxy (actually they are plastic shot glasses I found at a grocery store, I got 25 of them for 99 cents).  I placed a quarter inch bolt with a machine screw head into the hole of the plastic shot glass and bolted that together.  I put the end of the quarter inch bolt into my drill.  I loaded another plastic shot glass with the two parts of the epoxy and dropped in a 7/16” ball bearing in with it.  I used  a piece of duct tape to hold down the trigger on the drill and set it to turn at a very slow pace.  I put the glass with the epoxy into the other shot glass I had mounted into the drill and let it mix for five minutes.  I’ve been having tons of trouble mixing this epoxy since I started practicing putting on guides and threading.  Hopefully this will help with the mixing problem.

    After the epoxy mixed for the five minutes I applied it to the threads holding the guides down and then put the fly rod in my rod dryer and let it turn for three hours.  This is a picture of my rod dryer turning the fly rod with my rod threader in the foreground.

     Here’s a video of my workspace for making my new fly rod.

     After the three hours of drying were up I tapped on of the threads with my finger, man was it tacky.  In the past my inability to mix the epoxy left it sticky, even a week after I applied it to the rod, I’m hoping that the epoxy just needed more time to dry.  I will check it again in the morning.