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rendicott,

Welcome to the Fiberglass Flyrodders! I'm glad you decided to post.

You are right. If the cork is crumbling, it's repair time. Is the cork surface crumbling, or is it breaking all the way to the rod blank? If the entire grip needs replacement, something must come off to get the new cork on. However, if you can fly fish, you can repair a rod. With patience it should come out fine.

You could remove the reelseat and spacer material, replace the cork grip, and remount the reelseat. The difficulty is the rod blank's taper. It takes a bigger hole in the cork to get it over the butt end of the rod. You must shim the cork grip (or rings) and use a large winding check to cover the hole. Usually old reelseats come off with a quick twist, but sometimes they need heat and "persuasion".

Alternatively, remove the guides and butt wrap (take lots of pictures next to a ruler FIRST!), replace the cork grip, then rewrap the guides and butt wrap. The difficulty is matching the new thread color to the tip section. If the thread matches, great. If not, you could rewrap the whole rod and maybe even install new guides. If the old guides are even the slightest bit corroded or rusted, replace them all.

If only the cork surface is crumbling, you could put a layer of new cork over the old. Sand the outside of the cork grip into an even cylinder to remove the crumbles. Now enlarge the hole in the cork to fit over the cylinder. Glue on the cork and reshape the rod grip. Depending on how much cork you sand off the old grip, you may still need to remove the stripper guide to make this work.

A picture of the bad cork would help a lot too!


Tom