I have an old 5-star Garcia Conolon surf rod. One of the grandkids fell on it last trip out this season and now the butt section below the reel seat is bent. Just slightly but it is noticably deformed. The thing is, it isn't broken and appears to be plenty strong. How can a rod blank be bent that far and not broken? I assume this is just a fiberglass blank and would break if you took it too far past straight. I am serious when I say it is solid as all get out. Just bent.

Can you tell if it Is it the grip, or the actual rod. From what I understand, a lot of rods were built with an aluminum extension which the reel seat & the butt grip were built on. If you can see the actual blank is bent, then I apologize

Billy

It's below the seat so I can't actually see the blank. Maybe I'll pop the butt cap off and see what the heck is down there. I had no idea the butt section might be aluminum or something. The part that comes out of the foregrip is fiberglass for sure. Thanks.

a lot of those rods were built with an aluminum sleeve over the blank the grips and reel seat were mounted on the sleeves and then slid down and gluded onto the blank, it was faster that way then glueing the orginal parts directly to the blank.

John is correct. When Garcia purchased and came into the Conolon picture, they started using aluminum tubing in the butt section, which the handle was mounted on. You most likely have bent the aluminum tubing.
Bob Batson
Rainshadow Rod Blanks
Forecast Rod Components

This was done in order to facilitate the speed with which rods could be assembled. Handles would be built separately from the rods on a tube which was verbatim in size from handle to handle. This also made it possible to build handles in one place and rods in another. Handles and rods were joined afterwards.

It wasn't a bad way to do things, either. To this day I sometimes use the same technique to alter the length of a rod if I cannot find a blank that is exactly the length I need.

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The largest problem I have seen with using the tube method lies in trying to some repairs on the unit when necessary, and in some of the materials used for the tube,have even run into custom rods made with heavy copper tubing a horror to try and remove

I always enjoyed repairing those old surf rods with the aluminum butt sections - you could cut, grind, sand or whatever, without worrying about damaging the blank. And without any taper on the tubing, you could reinstall a grip or seat from the butt end.

And you know, for their time those were very good quality rods. I once took apart a Fenwick surf rod, probably 1970's vintage, that remains one of the best constructed rods, either commercially or custom made, that I have ever seen. It didn't have the aluminum butt section, but had so much attention to detail in various areas that I couldn't understand how they could have spent so much time on it and still made a profit. Some of the older and now defunct companies did the same thing. Perhaps that's why they are no longer around. Sad.

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Tom I don't doubt what you say but the vast majority of the ones in need of repair were the low end imports which contain virtually no quality at all,after a little use the eva grips could be peeled off the aluminum sleeve and only the lowest end reel seats were used always ended up being cheaper to buy another low end rod. I guess like most things in rodbuilding it all comes back to who is doing the building and how much care they put into the assembly

John,

I would agree. Yet the ones I was speaking of were the old Fenwicks, Harnells, Heddons, Silaflex, etc. At one point in time, they made a very high quality product. To my knowledge, they were produced here in the U.S..

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You guys were right. I popped off the butt cap and it is a tube. I suppose it is aluminum alright. I had no idea they were ever made that way. Well, that solved that. Thanks.

These are some of the best made factory rods that I have ever worked on. The glass was strong and you flat couldn't break the butt section in the normal course of fishing.

Replacing the cork and seats is a dream compared to tapered butt rods.