I had the bad luck to ship a rod to a client who had problems with the rod blank. As a result, I am building him a new rod, reusing what I can reuse from the first build, including the guides.

I speculated on resuing the grip, but over the years, I have tried with little success to be able to reuse any of these components. But that was before I had a lathe to use to help with the task.

So I spent some time last evening to attempt to rescue the cork and reel seat for reuse on the new rod. I chucked the grip in the chuck, clamped the end of the grip in a rod rest and use a drill in the tail stock chuck to advance the drill into the cork, blank and reel seat.

After gradually increasing the size of the bit to remove the bulk of the old blank, the components were essentially ready for resue. But, I still needed to get all of the blank remnants removed from the cork and reel seat, since the new blank was a different size than the original blank. I used a reamer to remove the rest of the blank material.

At the end of the time, I had successfully recovered the components for reuse, with one big issue. As a result of the boring and reaming to get everything cleaned out, the bore diameter had grown so large as to essentially make the components reusable for what I want to do, and how I like to build. The bore had not been increased so much as to allow the fitting of an arbor into the components, but too large for reasonable shimming or wrapping.

So, although successful in removing the blank, I still did not end up with a set of grip components that was willing to use on a high end new rod.

But the technique for boring works very well. i.e. the spinning of the object in the lathe and having a drill bit in the tail stock that gets advanced into the spinning work for a perfectly centered hole.

I am not likely to try that again, but it was an interesting experiment.

Be safe

Interesting, Roger. Although I hope to never be in that situation, I have also read that a chainsaw file heated well and then inserted in a drill and run up through butt end of blank can be useful in removing grips.

Thanks for the info, Bob

Hello Roger.

Why don't you just keep boring until the hole is large enough to use an arbor?

Tight Wraps & Tighter Lines.

Robert,
I may do that, because that option is certainly on the table, since the pieces have all been recovered.

Be safe