Three of us travel to Orlando to attend a Rod Building class

Don Hughes, Foy Maloy and myself traveled to the Orlando area (Oveido) this past weekend to participate in a Rod Building class put on by Mud Hole Custom Tackle, a rod building supply company. We left at 6:00am and drove downstate to arrive shortly before 9am. The class was led by Scott Gimbert, Vice President of Mud Hole and Todd Vivian, Vice President, Sales who did an excellent job of getting 14 novice rod builders started on a path to producing their own custom rods. We started with rod blanks, learned how to locate the "spine" of the rod, reamed out our cork grips and slid them down the rod and glued them. Then we glued the rod tip, marked the locations of the guides and then learned how to wrap the guides to the rods. We trimmed the wrapping, then protected the thread with some color guard and finally used epoxy to coat the wraps. Mudhole also provided us all with decals which included the spec's of the rod, a "Custom Built Rod by....label" and then we each got to pick out our own decorative decal (mine was a Redfish- go figure). The class lasted the entire day with mini breaks and a long break for lunch. On the drive back home we all agreed that the $99 fee was great deal: in addition to learning the basics of building a rod, we also learned how to replace our tips and guides on older rods. We got a nice rod "custom" built and we brought home some left over supplies and a new table top rod wrapping kit. The consensus was that we would be planning our next rod building project soon!