Monday, December 23, 2013

Swift Epic 686 salsa


Here is my second Epic salsa build. Appointed with an elegant reel seat from Bellinger in black anodized hardware and maple burl wood. I wanted an understated, clean build. The extra long inscription area was quite a challenge but I'm happy with the result. I added a hook keeper to hang those big streamers, since this rod is destined to be a streamer rod. A hell of a blank like this deserves to be "worked" properly. Soon it will leave to its new home.

















Saturday, December 14, 2013

Epic 686 salsa. In progress.


 






 

Steffen&Kabuto's

After a long wait, I finally got a bunch of some of my favorites classic blanks.

 And some more Kabuto white beauties and one darker than the usual brown.

Monday, December 9, 2013

T.F.M. Epic olive

Well the T.F.M. Swift Epic 480 olive was finally finished.

I did take my time on this after I had a bit of a discussion with Cameron regarding how he will want the wraps to look when finished. The Epic olive, is a very translucent blank, so it was a bit of a struggle deciding on whether to preserve the wraps or not. Normally I wouldn't. But after doing some tests I felt like I didn't want to have fully darkened and transparent wraps on this rod and keep the silk wraps a little lighter colored. So I decided to slightly preserve those beautiful olive wraps tipped in bright yellow in order to retain some sparkle in them when finished, but still have some translucency. I'm glad I did it as I was very satisfied with the result.

The components on this rod are pretty special. I found a matching winding check for my "Struble D27" inspired reel seat. The radiused hardware of this reel seat is very special as I worked on the design with Joel Lemke about a year ago. I wanted to have something similar with the Struble D27, but not exactly the same hardware. Joel was very happy with my ideea since he was the one to design the D27 back when he worked for Struble. Cameron likes a cigar type handle on his lighter glass rods so I hope I did him justice. I always use a cork sealer to maintain a nice smooth feel of the handle and to seal the pores in the cork.

The reel seat insert is an olive-yellowish piece of buckeye wood. It was the only thing I had on hand that was a good match for this beautiful olive blank. I went with light amber, almost white agate to complete the set.


I have a couple more Epic olive projects to come soon and I'm very eager to see what other thread options go well on this beautiful olive blank. I don't think I'll go much different on the next one but you never know.

 Hope Cameron will be happy with the rod when he will receive it. Thanks for looking everyone!