55 on the fly

On the Kingfisher fly rod; repaired the notches with GPS thread, enlarged and tapered the 1/4" hole on the cork grip for a nice fit. Glued on the wood reel seat spacer, the Kingfisher reel seat, the cork grip and the winding check.... it's starting to look like a fly rod. Tomorrow, do it all again on the A and I fly rod... after the grips then the finish is to be applied to all the bamboo sections. Finished grip section on the Kingfisher...

Today's project was to "try" and repair the Kingfisher's butt section's cracked ferrule. Background: A fellow turkey hunter and good friend gave me these two fly rods in the hopes that I could bring them back to life. When completed, I will get to keep the Kingfisher and he gets the Horrocks and Ibbotson Featherlight. Update: Both rods cleaned up nicely. The varnish stripper did it's job with 3 coats and a bunch of wiping and scrubbing with rags and a tooth brush. But in the end the bamboo is in nice shape and all sections look good. There was just a little thread dye that had bled into the bamboo from some of the original guide wraps that I could not remove and I can live with that. All the ferrules are okay except for two on the Kingfisher.... One has to be remounted and realigned, not a big deal, but the other is cracked badly on the butt section. Right or wrong I decided to take a "crack", pun intended, at fixing it. And since it was on the...

I have removed all the old line guides and split the old wraps from both fly rods and layed on the first layer of varnish stripper today. I think they will need about 2-3 coats of stripper and some scrubbing to remove all of the old varnish. I hope to have these rod sections ready by the end of the day for new finish sometime this week. All of the ferrules will also need to be cleaned and/or replaced, as at least one is cracked.