Old rod repairs

A couple of years ago an old friend and I went fishing on lough Cullen one fine July day. My outboard would not pump cooling water, so we returned to shore, removed my engine and got his engine out of the old wooden shed. After lugging it down to the mooring and fixing it to the transom we found that this engine would not pump water too! At that point we gave it up as a bad job and retired to his house for a cuppa. We chatted about this and that and then he mentioned there were a couple of old fishing rods in his shed which were broken. Perhaps I might take a look at them? After much hunting in the wonderfully disorganised shed we located the rods, thickly covered by years of dust. I took them home with me, promising I would have them fixed up in no time. Fast forward two whole years!!!!

My arm is still a bit iffy, so I’ve not been risking any heavy lifting and that includes fishing from the boat. Instead, I am picking off any small jobs that have been put on the long finger. That is how I came to be working on this pair of busted rods. The rods in question were just cheap old things but were still worth the small effort to get them back into useable condition. One was a spinning rod which was missing the tip ring, a five minute job to repair. Clean up the stump, use hot melt glue to secure the replacement ring and add a whipping just for extra security and to make it look a bit nicer. There was a fixed spool reel on that rod which badly needed a service so I took it apart and cleaned/lubricated it. The bail arm spring is still a bit lazy but otherwise it works OK and it will do as a spare.

The other rod was an elderly, translucent orange, hollow fiberglass leger rod made by Shakespeare, one of their Alpha range which were sold in the 1980’s. This one would need a bit more TLC. The mice had chewed a chunk of the cork handle, most of the whipping had gone from the butt ring, an intermediate stand off ring was mashed and the tip ring was broken. You could go online and buy a perfectly serviceable example of this rod for twenty quid, but where is the fun in that? Mooching around in my stock of odd rod rings failed to locate a suitable tip ring which would fit so I toddled down to Frank’s tackle shop in town and bought one that would do the job. No, it was not a perfect match to the original ring, but would do the job. Frank didn’t have any stand off ring though, so I decided I’d try to straighten the damaged one. The tip ring I had bought was a tad too big so I built up the blank under the tip ring with a double layer of 6/0 fly tying silk, just enough for the ring to touch but with enough room for the glue to cover the whole area and ensure good adhesion.

The handle was a mess where the hungry rodents had eaten the top part of the cork handle, meaning the sliding reel seat rings had nothing to locate against. The only way to repair it was to cut off the damaged corks and replace them with new ones. Given that the butt ring would need re-whipped I opted for stripping off both the butt and first intermediate rings on the butt section, repairing the handle then re-whipping the rings I had removed. My first task was to remove the two rings on the butt section, quicky achieved by nicking the old whippings with a razor and removing them and the the rings. I gave the blank a rub with medium sandpaper where the rings had been to remove any traces of the old varnish too. That done I next cut off the raggedy end of the handle to give me a nice straight edge for the new corks to sit against. Now for the fun bit.

I still have a few very old corks from my youth when I used to make lots of fishing rods. These have a standard bore size which was too small for this job, meaning I had to increase the diameter of the holes. I do this by wrapping a piece of coarse sandpaper around the blank, then sliding the cork down over the sandpaper and twisting it. In no time I had both corks seating nicely against the old handle and they could be glued in position using Arldite. It was getting late so I called it a day at that and left the handle to set overnight.

The next evening I resumed work on the leger rod. The corks were firmly in position now so I set about shaping them, firstly by crude cuts with a scalpel to remove most of the excess, then with files to give me the right shape before finishing off with ever finer grades of sandpaper to get a good finish. Once I was happy with the handle I re-whipped the butt ring and then the roughly straightened intermediate stand off. Lacking any silk remotely like the dark green on the rod I used what I had to hand, a pale tan colour. Far from ideal I know, but all I was aiming to do was resurrect a rod which at best would have been used to prop up some peas in the garden if I had not intervened, so mis-matching whippings were not a huge concern. Numerous coats of varnish over the new whipping followed, sufficient to protect them from any normal levels of abuse. While I was at it I gave all the other whippings a lick of varnish too.

Repairs completed, I brought the leger rod out for a trial to see how it would fish before returning it to John. That proved to be quite a session so I have written about it in a separate post. Compared to a modern carbon rod this old gal is thick and floppy and it has nothing like the sensitivity of a new Chinese made feeder rod. Lacking the now universal feature of brightly painted tips on bottom fishing rods, bite detection is certainly not what we are used too either. Having said all that, it is actually quite light for a rod of that era, the handle is just the right length and casts perfectly well. See the end of this report for a blow by blow account of a lively session!

Spending time and a little money repairing old rods is another foible of this old man. In purely monitory terms the tip ring cost me €3 and the rest of the bits were lying around in my collection of odds and ends which have accumulated over the years. If I had gone out and bought a couple of corks, the glue, a spool of silk and a bottle of varnish then the whole exercise would have been too expensive to consider doing. You can see why so many old rods get chucked out or are abandoned in sheds and lofts, it is just cheaper and less hassle to buy a new carbon replacement. In this era where we are being encouraged to ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ I think simple jobs like this make a bit of sense for people like me.

Normally, I work on little projects like this during the winter, it was only my current circumstances which gave me the chance to work on John’s rods now. There are some similar jobs to be done on a couple of old rods of my own plus a box of reels which I need to sift through. These are all is varying states of distress and will keep me entertained during the long dark nights, fiddling about with screwdrivers and pliers, swearing at springs which ping off and searching the internet for some obscure part which has been long out of production. I suspect there is a medical term for such pointless, futile wasting of my time, but I could be doing worse things.

What else have I been doing? I repurposed a cheap clothes rack into a rod holder for a start. Fishing rods were scattered in cupboards and sheds across the house and garden and had been looking at options for storage/racking to bring them all into one place. This was not going to be easy as I own about 50 rods. We were throwing out this rack on wheels which had been a temporary solution for storing clothes from a few years back, but I decided I’d try to convert it into a rack for the rods. Nothing ventured, nothing gained! The base of this contraption was a wire mesh (apparently for storing footwear), but by replacing it with a wooden board and moving the wire matrix up to the horizontal poles I could stand the rods vertically in the gaps between the wire mesh. I have just used cable ties to hold it all together for now, but so far it is working just fine. I can store all my rods, landing net handles and even long bank sticks comfortably. Only my very shortest rod tubes won’t fit, but that is not the end of the world and I’ll find some way of keeping the little rods close by. I have even been able to store the ‘H’ shaped handle for the Korum seat/barrow on the front of the rack, a huge boon for me as that damn thing is always in the way and hard to store. Now it dangles there in plain sight yet out of harms way. There is a bit of organising to be done, such as keeping rods of the same type together for a start, but I have achieved my aim of having my rods in one place now.

I am in the process of sorting through all my reels. One or two are past their best and have been retired, being replaced by spare reels I have already. I might sell some of the ones I rarely use. I have three Winfield ‘Bassfisher’ for example and there is no way I’ll ever use all three of them. I ended up with three as I built two of them from parts I had. The same is true of four other assorted Winfield multipliers (including one which has one green end plate and one black endplate) and a host of British made fly reels.

I have also started the daunting task of overhauling the storage of all my fly tying gear. This onerous job is one I’ve been putting this off for years, but while I am indisposed I’ll bite the bullet and reorganising the whole shebang. Plastic bags are on order as many of mine are split or won’t seal now. I made a basic tool caddy from an offcut of wood, nothing fancy now just a chunk of 3×2 which I sanded and drilled holes in to accept scissors, hackle pliers, bobbins etc. There needs to be a degree of rationalisation as I work through the materials as I have far too much of some things. Chenille, which I hardly use, is in great abundance for example. Sadly, bronze mallard (which I consume at a prodigious rate) is always in short supply. I am obsessive about hooks and own many thousands, but laying my hands on the exact one I want when tying is the devil’s own work. There are dozens of packets and boxes with only a few hooks in them so I’ll work my way through them first to create a bit more space and order. A few hundred salmon hooks and tubes will be tied up in popular patterns then probably sold off as I do virtually no salmon fishing these days.

Another, totally unrelated to fishing, project was getting an old guitar working. A cheap Strat copy had been lying around the house for years and a previous attempt to get it making some noise had failed. This time I took it apart and traced a couple of faults which were easy to remedy. While it now works I need to do some more to it as one of the pickups is dodgy and it need re-strung, but hey, I can now be heard practicing Led Zep tunes at the other end of the town!

So how is my dodgy arm doing? Progress remain slow. I know my limitations and every action is carefully considered before I undertake anything remotely strenuous. Still it catches me out sometimes with bolts of pain followed by a period of throbbing aches, usually in the shoulder but also the elbow and wrist depending on what I have been doing. I try not to get frustrated but the season is flying by while my boat lies unused. The next three weeks are a write off as I replace the ensuite in the master bedroom, paint the whole of the upstairs and then the sitting room. Being right-handed, my left arm can just dangle there while I wield the brush and roller. I’ll sneak out for the odd session here and there , but at this stage of the year I am essentially resigned to writing off the remainder of the game angling season and will focus on doing some fishing over the winter months instead. I have never seriously fished for pike, despite being surrounded by loughs full of them. Maybe this winter I’ll address that omission. In the meantime, I’ll venture with the coarse rods as that does not require any heavy work.