Coming back to rodbuilding after a few years away. Needed to upgrade my old wrapping system and wanting something that could be broken down and stored in it's own case. Needed to be compact but able to extend up up to at least 6ft. Most of the wrappers I've seen, even the "portable" ones have a fixed bed length that makes them cumbersome. A few days in the wood shop and I came up with the portable wrapper shown in the gallery here
[www.rodbuilding.org]

The case, bed, stands and carriage are all made of hard maple. The roller wheels and pulley are lathed out of a delrin cutting board I bought for 4 dollars. The belt is made of poly material you buy and cut to length and weld with a match. One problem was how to engage the check on the shaft. The solution I came up with was to heat the hex head bolt and set it into the PVC. Easy to break down and assemble with only a few parts. Chuck shaft turns on two roller bearings set into the wood on either side. The thread carriage was problematic. I tried to copy the production units but couldn't seem to get the tension right and kept breaking the thread. I ended up going back to my old system of running the thread through a folded piece of material pressed between two washers. Less part and perfect tension control. I abandoned the front thread guide altogether finding that I like controlling the wrap by moving the carriage and allowing the uptake wand to move on it's own as the thread stacks. The bed pieces are held together with draw bolts available at the local wood shop store. Easy to set up and break down.

Overall, I'm happy with how it turned out. The whole thing is about 16" square abd 7" wide. The overall weight turned out rather high due to the thickness of the bed planks which was driven by the depth of the draw bolts. An alternative would be to use cam lock bolts in the end grain but I didn't have any on hand. I could shave a few pounds on the next one I think.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/24/2016 06:52PM by Brian Issa.

Nice workmanship.

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Heck of a nice job, Brian! Looks furniture quality!

I was curious if you ever thought of selling one like that? I may be interested

Thanks for the positive feedback. I hadn't thought about selling one, just trying to improve my system. Like many things DIY, (including most rods) the cost of a custom build are probably more than buying one at the store. All told I probably have $175 just in parts along with a lot of time. My shop situation isn't ideal right now, but I have a friend that runs a CNC shop that could cut the tooling time down once the plans were set up. If there was a few people interested I could look into it and see if he would help me out.