4 Tips for New Rod Builders

In custom rod building, it's difficult to beat practice and experience; however, these 4 tips will help ease any beginner into the craft.

Practice Key for Building Custom Fishing Rods

With these essential tips, beginners can establish a solid foundation of understanding in rod building that make the craft as fun as it is rewarding.

1. Prepare Rod Building Work Station

Important to rod building and your significant other, set aside a dedicated work space solely for building your custom fishing rod. In other words, rod building on the dining room table or kitchen counter usually ends with sleeping uncomfortably on the couch.

Considering rod building requires gluing and finishing components with epoxy, it's best to plan and organize your work station in advance. This not only allows rod builders to find the adequate space, but also lay down paper, cardboard, or even a shower curtain for the steps using epoxy. Now, you can build away without any worry!

Dedicating a rod building work station gives you the adequate amount of space to stay stress-free, organized, and most of all, build your best high-performance fishing rod.

2. Check Components Prior to Building Custom Rod

Inspecting the components of your custom fishing rod prior to building helps ensure the ultimate performance of the finished rod. Whether checking the rod blank, guides, or grips, each rod component could have critical imperfections that will later lead to rod failure.

While checking for imperfections, you are also getting acquainted with the rod's components, which in turn helps assemble the best custom fishing rod possible.

For example, rod builders always need to find the spine of their fishing rod by flexing the blank and then labeling its strongest backbone. Based on this labeled spine, rod builders can assemble the components on the rod blank. This ensures the ultimate performance and experience with your custom fishing rod.

3. The Right Lighting for Custom Rod Building

Adequate lighting in your rod building work space is crucial to building a performance driven fishing rod. While building a custom rod is a fun craft, rod building in the dark is known to be more of a nightmare.

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Between battling shadows, losing key components, and sticking your elbows in epoxy, a dimly lit work environment will decrease your productivity and the overall performance of your finished rod. However, adding more light is all it takes to solve this problem.

When it comes to your rod building area, it's works best to have ample overheard lighting as well as a lamp that can put light directly where you are working.

If you need any additional aids while working on the detailed aspects of rod building, the CRB LED Magnifier is the perfect tool to help.

Just add the LED Magnifier to your CRB Hand Wrapper to observe and alter the details of your custom fishing rod easier than ever before!

4. Assemble Fishing Rod in Stages

For those newer to rod building, it is very important to realize that you don't have to assemble the entire custom rod in a single day. Working on your fishing rod in separate stages helps to not only eliminate mistakes from fatigue, but also help beginners enjoy the process of learning.

Although building in stages works well to combat fatigue, there can be moments where you feel frustration. In these moments, take a step away from rod building and come back later.

Remember, custom rod building is what you make it, so take your time building your custom rod and make it awesome!

For more great rod building advice, check out Mud Hole's Rod Building Class!