Well, I had family in town and couldn't make it to the meeting on saturday. I wanted to show ya'll a grip i've been working on. It's a split grip with a castaway fully exposed seat and a split foregrip. The inlays are buffalo horn. I'll have more pics of it soon....
Thanks guys...This will be my first rod that I've actually sold, so I'm excited about it. It'll make me enough that I can keep this little hobby going without the wife complaining :) Yeah, the buffalo horn I got from a knife making supplier. It's a real pain to work with. It doesn't lathe easily and it stinks when you sand it. I ended up shaping it with a coarse belt sander belt on the lathe and then sanding it down to 1200 grit. The tiger was a bit of a pain too. I started with white on the bottom and after 2 attempts to get the olive spaced right on top, I put too much CP on it and ruined the effect. I ended up cutting it all off and re-doing it with silver underneath. The buttcap was a total trial and error. It was my first time working with permagloss so that was a learning curve. Hopefully it will be decently tough and scratch resistant.... I don't have it glued up yet, so hopefully It will go together nicely. This is the second time i've done TX flags. Last time it was on a much wider blank, so it was a lot different doing it on a thin blank. I got the stars from some TX flag stickers that I razor cut the stars out of. This is the first of a four rod order that I'm making for Christmas presents for my boss... It's good to know rich fishermen! The CTS blank is really sweet, but i'm going to try some different stuff for the other three rods. The next will be on a Castaway XP3, and after that, I'm leaning toward a Batson RX8... anyway, I'll have this at our next meeting so ya'll can check it out. Thanks again!!
