Turning the Heart of the Rod | 4wt Fiberglass Travel Rod Build

In the second installment of my fiberglass rod build, I craft the reel seat and reconsider how fly rods tell their stories

A while ago I bought a hardcover book simply entitled Fiberglass Rod Making. It came home with an armload of others and found a home on the shelves in my office next to other fishing-related books I told myself I’d read someday. If buying this fiberglass rod blank was a spur of the moment indulgence, recalling that I had already accumulated reference material to help me build it felt like a deft piece of forethought.

Turns out the author, Dale P. Clemens, who passed away in 2014, was something of a fiberglass rod-building legend. Fiberglass Rod Making was his first of several influential books on the subject, and the start of a successful mail-order rod-building business he built from scratch and ran alongside his day job as an insurance salesman in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He later founded America’s first rod-building guild and traveled the country speaking about the craft.

Now that I’ve actually cracked Clemens’ book, I’m discovering what a treasure it is — not just for technical instructions, but also for his grounded observations about the craft itself. In Chapter One, “Why Build Your Own?,” he writes:

“The real thrill of fishing comes from outwitting the fish. It is something that you and you alone do...Many a fisherman has learned that his fishing thrill is enhanced when the fish is conquered on a fly that he tied. It is much better than on a fly he bought. Capturing your fish with a rod that you alone made provides an even greater thrill.”

Clemens goes on to discuss the pragmatic reasons to build your own rod, not least of which for him was the lack of access to the types of rods he wanted to fish; you couldn’t outfit yourself for a tarpon trip at your average Pennsylvania sporting goods shop in the mid 1970s.

Unlike Clemens, I was able to purchase all the parts required to build a custom fly rod in a matter of minutes, online, and have them shipped directly to my house. I wonder what he’s think about this project?

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While you can buy premade reel seats, and hardware with integrated reel seats, I knew I wanted this piece of the rod to be custom. A reel seat is just a short cylinder, about four inches long, with a hole drilled down the middle. At one end, you attach a fixed hood to hold one side of your reel. At the other end, there's a threaded section with rings that tighten down to secure the reel foot in place. This ensemble is then glued to the butt section of your rod and becomes the base for your cork grip.

Not only did I want the creative control over such a visual part of the rod, but I wanted to construct it to the rod and hardware’s actual dimensions. But doing so would require some help. Lucky for me, my brother Reuben is a master furniture builder and a talented rod builder; and his shop is a short drive down the road.

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There are many things I love about my brother, but his penchant for spotting and saving pieces of incredible wood is a kind of superpower that I truly admire. Tucked around his shop are piles of offcuts from previous projects, pieces of firewood that were too beautiful to burn, burls at various stages of drying and collecting sawdust. A project like this is catnip for him, and I love watching him bop around the shop retelling the stories of each piece like an excited museum curator.

When I briefed him on this project and explained what I was looking for, he disappeared into the annex and came back moments later with a piece of figured maple he’s been gifted years prior by a fellow woodworker and saved precisely for making reel seats.

Figuring is a deviation of the straight-grained cell structure of a tree caused by stress. We can’t see the cells themselves, but the figuring is readable as changes in luster or color. These striations are unique and when applied correctly by a craftsman can produce the type of stunning results that you might associate with a priceless Les Paul or Stradivarius.

We made our selection and nipped it from the source with a few passes through the bandsaw, cutting it first into a rectangle and then an octagon by trimming off the corners.

Reuben fixed the piece in lathe and in no time I was turning.

Clemens calls the reel seat the “heart of the handle section of a rod” and it quickly became apparent why. Precision is key here. The ends of the reel seat should fit inside the hardware with little to no wiggle room. The central bore should be as close to the diameter of your rod blank so that it rests snugly inside the seat. Turning the reel seat myself ensures that I get the aesthetic that I want in tight tolerances that I desire.

It took me a couple hours to turn the reel seat down to the correct dimensions. Another hour to carefully bore the central hole for the blank to slide through. None of this would have been possible without my brother, his experience, or the tools and materials he’s accumulated over decades of woodworking.

Up until this build, it has been really easy for me to disassociate the manufacturing process of a fly rod from the rod itself, an occurrence all too common in our modern consumer existences. For us, a product’s life begins when it arrives on our doorstep. We rarely stop to ponder how it got there.

This rod changes that. Years from now, someone picking it up might never guess the hours, mistakes, or conversations behind it. But I’ll know. And every cast will remind me of the story it carries, the story that’s only beginning to unfold.