I have built fishing rods for more than 15 years, from my first battered spinning rod glued on a kitchen counter to a full custom rod shop that turns out a dozen blanks a month. Through all of that, the single piece of gear that changed my workflow was a good rod building wrapper. The […]

Choosing the best rod blanks for building your own custom fishing rod is the single most important decision you'll make on the entire build. I learned this the hard way my first year of rod building, when I picked a flashy graphite blank without checking its action and ended up with a rod that couldn't […]

When I started building rods fifteen years ago, I picked the cheapest reel seat on the shelf and lost a trout reel on the third outing. That moment taught me what experienced rod builders already knew: the best reel seats for rod building are not the priciest or the prettiest, they are the ones that […]

I've been building custom rods for over a decade, and the first time I tried rotating a freshly epoxied rod by hand for six straight hours, I promised myself I'd never skip the best rod drying motors again. A quality drying motor takes the worst part of rod building (waiting while epoxy cures) and turns […]