Rod Building & Repairs In Manchester

Full top to bottom restoration of a very vintage Milbro Solglass spinning rod originally made in Scotland and probably around the 60's or 70's time period. Some of the original hardware has been preserved, reel fittings and the butt cap and brass ferrules on the joints.
The rod was originally light green so the blanks had a strip down, colour and glossing before building on. The rings are K style anti tangle spinning guides and I've replicated the original colour scheme of wine red and candy apple red edgings. I believe it will be fished along with a period reel to match, so it should be good now for another 50 years! 😉👍🍻

Silstar Picker handle conversion from start to finish.......... Good for another 35 years now ! 🍺

Much like buses, don't see one for a while then 2 come at once 😋.
Another set of XTB's, just cleaner and looked after a bit better!
No issues with any of these beauties !

A set of original Ultegra XTB's from a week or so ago, lot of water/rust marks, lots of crud and crap, some of the side decals fell off and the last one was really bad, needing a whole bunch of internals hand cleaning with some help from Mr Dremel, and a new worm gear and pawl to replace the very well chewed one that was slowly grinding to death inside !

Follow up post from a couple of weeks back where I'd just started building another couple of swingtip rods - this is one of the finished Silverfish swingtip rods - a lovely light grey and metallic blue colour scheme - just about to list it on the website so give me a shout if you're interested ! Cheers. Dave

https://www.swingtip.fishing/swingtip-rods/

Start to - nearly finished - shots of two fly rods that I've put new handles on, as the original slim handles were getting a bit uncomfortable to use, due to the chap having arthritis in his hands, so gripping a chunkier cork handle, turned from 31.5mm diameter corks, down to about 29.5/30mm, is a lot more comfortable than the old handles which were about 25/26mm at most. Hopefully this makes life a little easier and he can carry on chucking that fluff into his 80's and 90's ! 🥳😁👍🍻

One of my customers that had two of my intermediate swing tip rods built, to colour match his Daiwa reels, recently sent me a really nice message, letting me know how pleased he was with the rods, and a few pics to show me his set up.
Very nice looking set up if I don't mind saying myself! 🥳🍻👍

Conversion on a Daiwa 123m closed face reel from plastic bushes to 2 stainless steel ball bearings. The 125m can also have the same conversion done, but not the original Daiwa 120m .

The start of the strip down to put new handles on a set of Horizon X5's. This is why a lot of rod builders don't want to do mods and repairs, all the stripping down, and then cleaning up, to get you to the point where you can actually start !