I am about to make the plunge in to hi-tech rod building and am willing to plunk down some serious coin (for me, anyways!)for this investment. I have seen and toyed with the Clemens' rod lathe, how does it compare and differ from the Renzetti lathe? They are outwardly similar but I don't know the depth of both machines. What I do like on both lathes is that the thread feeds from behind and above the blank.
On the Clemens, I especially like the spring steel arm/guide that lets you back up under tension! Reminds me of my old Sully!
Your comments and opinions would be most appreciated!
Jim

They are very similar and both have a reverse tension spring so you can back up under constant thread tension when you make one of those "professional overwinds".

I have owned 3 of the Renzetti lathes going back about 15 years and have spun, wrapped and turned tens of thousands of rods on them without a single problem. I would have no problem personally endorsing this product to the fullest extent. I have also worked with 2 different Clemens lathes and found them to also work well. No problems. I cannot imagine that you would not benefit from either one of these quality lathes.

You didn't ask, but I will also mention the Custom Power Wrap unit. It's quite a bit different from either of these but no less effective. It is more portable, if you desire that sort of thing, but has less accessories available. More are on the way however.

I know that a top-end quality rod wrapping/turning lathe seems like a lot of money. But anyone who is in this for the long haul will benefit from having such a tool in their shop.

...............................

Have owned 2 Renzetti/Clemens (bought from Clemens in the 80's) lathes and they have survived years of abuse and moving around.

Make sure you get the heavy duty tension springs both spool and thread guide spring. The light ones don't cut the mustard. Order at least 3 bed sections and 3 rod supports. Also, if you want to turn grips, invest in the heavy duty motor. Makes life much easier.

Jim
I have not seen the current Clemens lathe, but the last one I saw was either a direct copy of, or a remarked Renzetti. In any case both of these lathes would be fine for many rod making duties, but both suffer from a basic design flaw which (IMHO) renders them unacceptable unless you are doing lots of multi thread butt wrapping. The problem with these lathes is that both the rod supports and thread carriage ride on a common carrier. In short, either the thread carriage, or rod support(s) must be dismounted to move past one another. You will have to make multiple setups to get a rod wrapped. When you consider the work involved in setting one of these lathes up versus something like a Flex Coat speed wrapper for instance, the Flex Coat unit would be much faster for rod wrapping. I have never seen a multi purpose rod lathe that could do any single function as well as some other tool. You could get a nice simple rod wrapper and a benchtop wood lathe like the Ryobi, or Grizzly knockoff of same and have about as much as you would in either of the lathes you mentioned. The major advantage would be you would now have a quick rod wrapper and a more than adequate grip shaping/wood turning tool. If you do multi thread wraps on every rod you build, the Clemens or Renzetti would be a good addition to the two above mentioned tools, but on their own, would be (again IMHO) more of a pain than a blessing.

It is perfectly obvious that Joe has never actually used either a Clemens or a Renzetti and is merely speculating from seeing a picture of one or something similar. So many experts have similar qualifications. I have both a Renzetti and a Clemens, use them on a daily basis and probably am a bit more qualified to expound on their virtues and drawbacks. I have just finished installing the guides on a 11 ft surf rod. I made one setup, tied on 10 guides with no hassle, then without changing any setup went back to each guide and added a contrasting trim ring. This on the Renzetti. Whats all this nonsense about having to make multiple setups?

When one sees the Clemens and the Renzetti together it becomes obvious that they are from a common design. The bed sections, the rod supports, the tool support, are all interchangeable. The thread carriage and the power head are where the differences lie. The Renzetti thread carriage is much lower in profile and considerably lighter in weight than the Clemens. But the biggest attraction to the Renzetti is the thread spool attachments. On the Renzetti, the spools are contained between two dimpled/machined washers which act as the axle for the spool. the first time you use this method you will swear that the spools are mounted on ball bearings. It makes for a very smooth operation and a very positive tension control. The 8 spool Renzetti carriage is about half the weight of the 8 spool Clemens, and since you are picking up the carriage and setting it back down onto the base several times per rod, this weight thing mounts up.. I don't like the mounting of either one of them. They both run on three wheels....The Clemens is very unsteady for my taste. It wobbles all over the place, so I changed the three wheels to four and it works much better. The Renzetti is also a 3 wheeler but it comes with a cam adjustment which locks the carriage tightly to the bed so there is no play or wobble. I don't like this either. Its a two hand operation when picking up the carriage to go around a rod support and just seems like an unneccessary evil, but making it into a four wheeler solved all problems. Both designers could have applied basic engineering principles here and made them four wheelers in the first place. Both units use the same chuck, but I like the Clemens power head better than the Renzetti because you don't lose any bed length. The motor is off to the side on the Clemens and behind the power unit on the Renzetti. I understand the new Renzetti power head with the reversal switch is real nice but I have no first hand experience with it so can't comment on it. I took my power unit and modified it to make it all electronic, installed a variable speed control on the unit, so I can control the speed with the foot control and the power head.

I don't know how many hundreds, perhaps thousands of these fine units are in use world wide, and I have never heard of a single complaint about having to make multiple setups. A little reasoning would tell Joe that the popularity of these units would never be what it is if what he speculates had a bit of truth in it.

I also have a Custom Power Wrap which has different tracks for the rod supports and the thread carriage. There is no advantage one way or the other as far as I'm concerned. This CPR is very portable. You can just pick up the whole unit and take it with you. There is a real neat reversing concept done with the drive belt. Its simple and foolproof. The new foot switch is very positive and smooth. Mine has a speed control on the power head like I added to the Clemens. I understand that the new CPR have eliminated this feature which is a mistake.

These three units are without a doubt the class of the worlds rod building power tools. The many units such as the flexcoat are in an entirely different league. Your'e comparing single A with the big league boys.

Ralph

Ralph, thank you so much for your kind words. I would like to point out however that after all your slaming of my OPINION, you agreed with my observation that the thread carriage must be dismounted from the rail in order to move around the rod supports. I don't know where you are from, but in my neck of the woods, we would consider that to be a multiple setup. Apparently we have come to loggerheads over semantics. In any case, I have had occasion to use the Clemens lathe I mentioned and no matter how light the Renzitti carrier is, it would still be a pain to constantly have to dismount and remount the thing. As you also observed, the 3 wheel support design is inadequate and could have been better served with the addition of a fourth wheel. I have at times had as many as a dozen rods to wrap for a single order and every bit of time I can save by using a tool with a superior design is time I can apply to my next order. In addition to the above, why pay so much for a single tool that tries to perform multiple functions and falls short on every one when one could have a much better power wrapper and a true wood lathe for less money? As for sales figures relating to quality, if the popularity of an item equaled quality of same, then the hundreds of thousands of $10 rods sold by the various All-Marts each year must be superior to anything you or I could produce. They are by far more popular that our offerings. One last thing and I'll put my soap box away, at 45 years old, 6'1" and over 200 lbs I am already a big boy. I doubt that I have been building rods as long as you, I've only been at it for a little over 11 years now, but I hope that my junior status does not prohibit me from offering an individual opinion on an open fourm such as this. If that is the case, I most humbly apologize for doing so. My only intent was to relate my personal experience with the design of the Renzitti and Clemens lathes.

Dick, it's refreshing to see a company owner with the integrity to ask such a question in a public fourm. On the subject of your companies lathe design, with the exception of minor improvements, unless you had an inordnate number of complaints about having to remount the thread carriage I would not worry overmuch about it. It is obvious your lathe was designed as a multipurpose rod building tool and to that end it would be hard to beat for the individual rod builder that needs to conserve space and has no need to quickly produce a large quantity of rods. My rod building situation is a bit different in that I supply several local shops with rods on a regular basis in addition to the individual orders that are always coming in. This requires me to optimize the time I spend in the shop. Since I cannot compromise the quality of the product to meet production, I have to make up time by using the most efficient tools I can find. To be honest, most of my equipment is homemade and purpose built. With the exception of a wood lathe and metal lathe, my power wrapper, cork lathe and drying unit are all scratch built. I use an internal expanding mandrel and collet chuck system that is common to all three stations which allows a rod to be quickly chucked in any of the three stations without having to change anything. The supports in all three stations are spring loaded with cam locks so I only need to lock the collet on the mandrel, let the rod find it's center and lock the supports. Total setup time for all three stations is usually around a minute or two.

Once upon a time I mounted a separate lathe bed upside down and over the top of the bench mounted one. The rod supports ran upside down and backwards and the thread carriage adjusted so that it did not need to be removed, ever. Nice set up, but it required more bed sections, more room, etc.

When Andy visited last month we talked about having two beds so the carriage didn't have to be dismounted. What we both came to realize is that the time required to dismount and remount the carriage, was only about 2 or 3 seconds tops. So you had to balance the cost of a separate bed for the carriage and another for the supports, versus the inconvenience of the remounting the carriage a couple times per rod. It's no contest for most people. Thus, a single bed for all the supports and carriage.

In truth, the inconvenience of dismounting and remounting the carriage is not as great as it seems. I figure it costs me about 10 seconds per rod.

...................

OK folks, I stand corrected. I'm sure it's my experience as a machine and process designer that causes me to look at any machine from a production standpoint. That coupled with my need to reinvent the wheel in every situation usually finds me on the opposite side of any arguement regarding the relative merits of a popular tool or piece of equipment, especially anything that is specifically designed as a multipurpose device. To those that took offence at my remarks, I most humbly apologize. As I said in my last post, the Renzetti/Clemens design would make a fine tool for those that had no need for production speed as well as space limitations that would preclude having several purpose built pieces.

Joe,

There is no doubt that any tool can be improved, particularly if for a single specific purpose in mind. Your ideas would be wonderful and might be welcomed by one of the commercial makers.

I guess the idea behind these lathes is to provide the greatest number of rod builders with the greatest number of options in a single tool at the lowest cost. Not an easy task. Overall, I think they do a very, very admirable job.

If you really want to maximize one of them for your purpose, then you might consider separate beds for the carriage and supports. It can be done and I'm sure with your experience you could easily adapt/fabricate something to make it work to your liking.

.......................

The powered wrapper I am currently using is a double track design with the headstock, rod supports, and thread carriage all riding on common blocks so it can be set up to work either left to right or right to left. As the guide tracks are both the same size, it can also be set up to run either thread in front or behind the rod. I use it in the left to right (butt to tip) and thread in front configuration, but it can be changed to any of the above configurations in a matter of minutes. The drive motor and headstock have six step pulleys and the motor also has a corse speed control dial, a reversing switch, a foot control, and a switch that allows either the dial or foot control to govern the motor speed. In addition to the above, I have made a set of blocks to raise the working height from 4" to 9" for doing pier rods with Foulproof guides. As everything is built with locating pins and cam locks, changeover from one height to the other takes all of a couple of minutes and can be done with the rod in place. The basic bed is 10' long and I also built 2 additional 4' extensions. I've also fabricated a couple of thread carriages so I can either run a single rod with small spools or a group of rods with large spools. As I prefer to hand control multiple threads in butt wraps, I've also built a small bobbin box that can be held in my hand and holds 6 standard sewing machine bobbins. Along with that I have taken the guts from a sewing machine bobbin winder and adapted them to allow the quick filling of these bobbins from a large spool. My cork lathe is built as a single track version of the wrapper and my drying unit is a six track unit with a common drive motor that turns the rods at 36 rpm. Each head has a double pulley and drives the next station over with an O ring belt. Each belt has it's own cam actuated tensioner so only those stations with rods in them need be turning. As all three units use a common track size, all the rod supports used are interchangeable between the three units. This is also the case with the cork lathe and power wrapper headstock, and the drying headstock has all the working parts on the front so it can be quickly changed over to work for the wrapper or lathe and vice versa. I know it sounds like overkill, but i wanted to cover all bases when I decided to build my own tools.

Joe,

I would really like to see some photos of your unit. It might even be something the magazine readers would enjoy seeing, if you were open to having some photos of it published. Let me know if you are interested.

..........................

Does anyone know what size roller bearings are used on the Renzetti thread carrage?