Repairing vintage rods

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salvelinusfontinalis

salvelinusfontinalis

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I have a few vintage fiberglass rods that need some work. One is an orvis powerflex 8' 7wt and the other is an orvis fullflex 7'6" 5wt. Both have some guides that need rewrapped.

Question is do you:
A) try to keep them as original as possible? Only repair the guides that need it and make them look as close to the original?

B) re-do all the guides so they are as functionally sound and strong as possible and say f it to keeping them original?

I'm leaning towards the latter. I plan on using them as I love these two fiberglass rods and have little interest in value or selling them.

What would you do?
 
If you are going to fish it, I would re-do all the guides. Fishing time is precious.
 
I would probably redo all the guides if I was planning to fish it hard.( I would stick to the original color scheme though.) I find that vintage rods , particularly production rods, have a very minimal coating of varnish on the wraps and once that starts to deteriorate, it goes pretty fast. If one or two guides need replaced now, you'll likely need to replace more in the future anyway.

Kev
 
salvelinusfontinalis wrote:
A) try to keep them as original as possible? Only repair the guides that need it and make them look as close to the original?

B) re-do all the guides so they are as functionally sound and strong as possible and say f it to keeping them original?

Some older rods were the victim of cost-cutting, however Orvis was probably not party to this.

In the case of the budget made rods, guide spacing may not have been optimum. If you were going to add more guides, then obviously you would need to do them all. If that's not important, and you just want to use them repair/replace the guides that need the attention.

If I were simply repairing a single guide, I'd use whatever I had available.

If it was me, I would probably strip the whole thing down and restore it with modern materials to a configuration that I like, including thread type and colour, handle and seat, guides, and I'd think long and hard about pulling the current tiptop as its likely grooved and scratched from years of use.

Actually, that's not really true. I'd band-aid the missing guide and move on with my life, but I'd think about re-doing the whole rod.
 
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