HARDY GORDON'S CARPQUEST

 

 

This bargain basement fibreglass carp rod turned out to be a challenging refurbishment. I have a habit of collecting rods that either I owned myself in the distant past or ones that I was jealous of and couldn't afford at the time. My best mate's dad had one of these and used it for barbel on the Thames and back then I thought it was the bee's knees.

     I had more trouble restoring this one than affording it because it only cost me a tenner. Its problems however were many fold. For a start, the handle had been chewed away at both ends by rats. Bizarrely, the undamaged part still had the plastic on from new. 

The silver paint was shelling off of the brown, probably Fibatube, blank and now appeared dark green due to age discolouration of the varnish. 

The female ferrule was cracked and the manufacturers label was damaged. In short only the blank and the rings needed no repairs.

     Removing the rings was an obvious first step as it allowed me to match the original colour of both the blank and the silk. The best colour match I could find at Halfords was BMW Space Grey. The purple silk with black tippets was easy as I could match them from my stock of old threads.

     Scraping the old paint from the blank was also pretty easy as it had never been primed or the fibreglass keyed before painting. The problem came with the labels which are key to any restoration. I had to leave the old damaged paint on the first six inches above the handle for fear of making things worse so I just feathered the edges and stopped up the scratches as best I could.

     Moving on to the handle, there was just enough shape left in the damaged areas to make a card profile from. I purchased the corks and set about repairs. First of all, I removed all the damaged cork and trimmed cut the ends of the remainder square. I turned up a tapered mandrel on my lathe and taped a spiral of sandpaper to it, put it in a drill and reamed the corks out until they slid down the blank. Then I glued them in place to the fore end using epoxy. The butt end was awkward as of course the corks have to go over the thicker end of the blank first. The answer here was to build the blank up level with coarse thread and the just open out the holes in the corks until they fitted. The butt cap had corroded badly but I was able to save the original button and turn a replica on the lathe. I was able to turn the whole handle on the lathe as well in order to sand it to shape.

                  

     That was a major step forward and it was beginning to look like a more worthwhile project. The cracked ferrule would not come off but I managed, with a very low melting point solder, to repair it in situ. Later on I would extend the whipping to cover this. The only major job left was to paint the blank. All bare fibreglass was very lightly scuffed with 600 grade paper. The transfers, logo and various maker's marks were carefully masked off using Tamiya modeller's masking tape. It was the only solution I could come up with although at the end it did mean that they would appear on green windows in the new silver finish.

              

     I used a white aerosol etch primer and then painted the whole blank in one go. The rod was re-whipped using the original rings at the original spacings recorded before removal. The damaged decals were touched in and three coats of lightly thinned PVA glue applied over all the whippings as a colour preserver and the decals to resist any further damage. Three coats of Rustins gloss yacht varnish completed a tricky restoration and while my solutions to the damaged decals worked ok, I can see that a better solution is required for the future. I have since discovered and purchased some inkjet waterslide paper so in theory, I could reprint and repair or replace them. Repairing them would save most of what remains of the originals but only replacing them would enable the entire blank to be resprayed. I'm still thinking about that one.

     The rod in use is lovely and has already landed some sizeable carp and looks very smart as it waits heron-like for the next take so all in all a satisfying job bringing an interesting rod back from the brink.