Mud Hole Live: Dragon Scale Wraps – 6/1 at 6:30 PM EST

all right all right we are here we're back we're back what are we doing tonight we're going to be talking about dragon scales tonight actually yeah as it pertains to rod building of course right absolutely now did you have a good weekend i did yeah nice holiday weekend excellent good long weekend yeah fantastic got some sun and all that good stuff and yeah how about yourself it was good good fished a little bit got on the boat um just did some rod building stuff honestly yeah we got a trip coming up i've heard we are going striper fishing in the boston harbour should be a good time it should be fantastic so we built a couple of the saltwater blanks out of the near shore series you know the sw 80s things like that yeah so i had to put some finishing touches on that um you know the guys kind of helped put some design together and then i knocked him out and jay and phil they did some photo and video stuff for him so kind of putting something together for you all hopefully it's going to be fun we're going june 7th good they say it's supposed to be hot yeah not weather but fishing good good maybe maybe weather too i don't really know yeah certainly not hotter than here i was gonna say it's gonna be a little cooler up in boston than florida for sure i hope it's not gonna hit us with like a cold front or something yeah you know a june cold front is not something that i would look forward to but definitely not maybe a little change of pace you know maybe get in the 50s or 60s i don't know we'll see gotcha yeah well cool so tonight yeah we're going to be discussing as i said dragon scale which is a super easy but kind of an effective um decorative accent i guess you could add to your custom rod yeah like i said it very limit or very few tools required to do this yup but it can really make your um your custom rod pop a little bit for sure now there there's always a little bit out of the peanut gallery of doing dragon scale with mesh tape and doing dragon scale with thread uh braided fishing line or like monofilament fishing line right so we are going to show everyone tonight how to lay it out and how to do it with mesh tape because it gets a really nice effect it's something that's easy for everybody honestly but we are also going to discuss the advanced way to do it and you know it's not necessarily the right or the wrong way but we will talk about how to kind of lay it out we're not going to do it on the show tonight we will do it in a future show but it's just i wouldn't say that it's all that advanced it's just time consuming right so we're not going to do that tonight but i will kind of walk you guys through it take you over the whiteboard as we do on some things and we'll talk about it yep so of course we have giveaways as always always we got our third second and first place looks like we got some thread assortment kits of course we're going to be giving away some mesh tape as well and actually that feeds into the second giveaway as well which also has a handle kit and then the grand prize we have a multi-option rod kit with a thread kit and mesh tape got it you know gotta bring them all together for sure cool all right so uh i think hopefully everybody's filtering in looks like uh jay and phil are ready to rock are you ready to go ahead and get this thing kicked let's go there is nothing wrong nothing wrong with your television set do not attempt to adjust the picture we are controlling transmission [Music] all right episode 73 here in the penthouse from good old mud hole custom tackle love it all right um we need to talk about the photo contest first yep because that's coming to a close in a couple weeks you know you got a hashtag build two win it's on guide wraps it ends june 28th uh get those photos in put them in the mud hole live rod builders workshop i think we're 15 000 members plus it's still growing it's the biggest it's the best it's mud whole lives rod builders workshop you get all the details for the photo contest there uh like chris said it ends in june the end of june yep so you got three three three ish more weeks to uh to get those guide wrap pictures and photos submitted into the workshop group absolutely um and of course there's plenty of submissions already in there yeah so you can still get some ideas if you want to and with a little bit of free money yeah win some some gift cards oh yeah oh yeah all right now for those this is a good time of year to do this so we're doing a surf rod building class okay july 23rd 24th and 25th and i have thrown this blank that they're going to be using it's the crb 9 foot gator graphite surf rod now this is going to come in a kit so you can go over to mudhole.com classes that's going to give you dates for the diy rod building classes and the in-person classes correct so this one is an in-person class okay um and speaking on the the nine foot um blank you actually get three options there oh so there's a seven power eight power and nine power i cannot quote the exact line ratings on the top of my head i think the one i used was like a one to four maybe uh it was really nice we actually used it in stuart last year kind of during the prototyping stages and it was it was cool you know for those that uh like the nine footer like the one piece it's great yeah i really liked it yep awesome so three three different options for your nine foot blank and as we mentioned this one is actually in person one of the few that we'll have in person this year we have a couple more later this year yeah because for those that don't know we have a full education center here at mud hole in oviedo i don't know how big the place is the room is but it's huge yes it's fantastic it's really really just a great place to learn how to build rods so yep and it's a three-day class still plenty of spots available there you can get that uh check it out muthol.com forward slash classes perfect and as you mentioned there's a ton of other classes there too if you guys are interested in a virtual class definitely check out that those have been very popular for us and um you know you can do that at the comfort of your home you don't have to travel or sure come to orlando or anything like that so that's a cool feature if you want to come to florida come on yeah we got it good time of the year for it yep all right so the demo tonight talked about it we're doing dragon scale now as previous maybe the last two or three my whole lives we have on the website mudhole.com mhl stands for mud hole live we have an area there that will give you the tools and supplies that we are going to use on the show so after the show's over if you want to buy some of this stuff you don't have to go hunting over the website there's a lot of stuff there and it is a great site but if you want to do stuff that is pertaining directly to what we're doing tonight that mudhold.com mhl and that's going to give you you know everything that we're gonna use so yeah what are the steps that we're gonna take yeah so this one is pretty easy for dragon scale you mentioned you know before the intro we're gonna be using mesh tape tonight so it's super easy you know this is just standard mesh tape it's got built-in design already that's why we use it's very easy to use you can also you know we'll show later how to cut this material to kind of tweak the design a little bit come up with your own pattern if you want to or you can just go very simple with how it comes right yeah a couple other things you're going to need is a good pair of scissors whether you want to use these that we have around the the shop here or even the little clippers yep that you use for you know your guide wraps also got a burnishing tool just to have it so you know because typically when we do these dragon scale wraps we're being you're going to be doing a large area right sure you know whether it be in your split split grip area you know down where your reel and handle is or even above your fore grip it's typically going to be a little bit longer section you're not going to be doing little you know one or two inch sections of dragon scale for sure certainly can oh absolutely but to get the full effect and a really good pattern these are typically typically going to be five six seven inches long um of course that can vary but um but there's an example of one in green that that you did earlier on and you guys can see hopefully effect we're kind of going with yeah and that one is actually that one is done with thread it's just more of a wide cross wrap type pattern and then to give you kind of a contrast this is actually using the mesh tape it's just a tighter weave is not the right term but it's just a tighter pattern the gaps between the uh the squares if you will uh are just tighter so that right there is something that will give you you know a difference between a more open pattern that you can change when you use thread or monofilament or fishing braid or if you want one that's very consistent you can use the mesh tape if you know either you want to do it quickly or if you don't maybe feel confident to do it freehand yet those are options and it does give a cool effect yeah for sure and you know essentially after you've you know decided on your placement of the dragon scale you've kind of determined your pattern last but not least you can just go over it with thread and that could be any threat of your choosing that can be you know metallic is is a preferred option just because it it really pops on your rod blanket and it i think it shows the pattern a little bit better it does you know because it has a little reflective you know to it being metallic and then that's what it helps cast a shadow and it it shows it better i think it shows it better yeah so metallic would probably prefer whether you want to go with the standard pro wrap metallic um pro fx would be a great option it's a little bit easier to wrap these long sections with with pro fx sure um and then um you know after that apply your finish to it simple as that and there's even a couple steps that we'll probably show at the end of the show um you know you can do a floating decal super cool over these because you got a lot of room to work with you could easily put your your spec decal you know if it's visibly shows up you know depending on what colors you use um floating decals are another cool option though always yep always i think that's a big hit with like most people yeah you know because it gives just put a couple layers of finish gets that decal up off there yep so absolutely that's it all right cool um you want to give something away before we get into this bad boy here good certainly good we think we're going to do a pro wrap 18 spool thread assortment kit and fiberglass mesh tape that's a 300 foot roll that's what you got there so just no telling how many thousands dragons that you could do you could do some serious dragon scale with 300 foot of mesh tape um you know that's going to help you get started so you'll have your pro wrap which that spool comes with what either nylon or color fast and then your metallics correct so there's kind of an assortment kit in there that's really all you're going to need for that um you know when you do the pattern underneath using the mesh tape or if you're going to use thread you don't really have to pick and choose you know you can use any thread you want or you can use fishing line or you know that so um all right so our winner for that is brian hagerty brian coming out of facebook congratulations bud that's going to get you a pro wrap spool thread assortment kit and the mesh tape to get you started if you haven't already started on the dragon scale stuff yourself so um why don't we go ahead and we'll get into this demo because the great thing about this is you don't have to do a ton of planning no you know you need to know the general area where it's going and you can do this it's it's a fairly i guess you would say like it's low lying it's fairly unobstructive so you could easily do this before you slide grips down for sure um now granted maybe cork you might have to be careful with because you know if you start putting layers of finish before you get the cork over but if i'm doing wind grips or eva or something like that and i'm gonna do a dragon scale wrap i am 100 laying the mesh tape down and i am going to put one thin thin coat of finish right over it before i put the grips on then i'm going to put the grips on then if you want to use winding checks or not that's a personal preference and then i'm going to come back and do you know layers of finish add decals or not whatever and then build it up from there and then it will provide a very seamless type look because then you'll be able to make that dragon scale disappear up under the grip or a winding check or whatever you want to use there and it'll look you know it'll give that just very seamless look very true and i agree with you on that point it does it gives you a better seam that you know that better transition that you typically if your grips are already in place and even whining checks just don't get that transition like you do if you do it ahead of time but certainly you can't do it on all builds like you said eva wind grips just be sure don't apply too much finish you want to do a very thin coat just to wet the thread and so it'll kind of set that thread and won't move at all and you should be good yeah and you know that there was a question on the questions page there asking about thread uh color preserver so do you need to use color preserver to block the mesh tape from passing through a light color thread bruce i use metallic 99 of the time if if not more than that to be honest with you so metallic is not going to really show through or the i'm sorry the mesh tape is not going to show through the metallic right um you know metallic doesn't necessarily need a color preserver in in that term um if it was if it was very very light color thread you know you you might need to do it but what i would do is i would do a little test run first um i just putting putting the i mean the mesh tape is white so it's not like it's you know a very hot color or anything like that i don't i don't think you're going to see much of much of an issue that color preserver would even fix um honestly so yeah i think the only thing i'd be concerned with is maybe a very light shade of regular nylon right because it can turn translucent almost like a not translate it's not the correct word but it can show through a little bit of the color from underneath that would be the only case where i'd be worried i think translucent is right yeah thank you but even in that case i i really wouldn't be worried about that mesh tape showing through too much it's it's a really really thin material yeah and uh it typically lays flat anyway you know so it's going to give you the design but not necessarily that white color showing through yeah it's going to be more that you're going to see the pattern and not really the color yeah honestly like you said just test it beforehand you know if you want to put um just a little test wrap down and and um you know put some finish over top of it just to see if if you use like white silk i mean you're gonna you might as well just put finish over the mesh tape and yeah and leave it because yeah i wouldn't i wouldn't do that but uh yeah so good question yeah absolutely all right cool so let's talk about laying this thing out yeah what you got for me all right so first of all we're gonna obviously start with our roll of mesh tape and i see how you followed the cornrower well because that gets lost you know when i first picked it up off the the workbench over here the shelf earlier it was completely flat and it took me a couple minutes to to find the edge so you're welcome for that one didn't you because i had to hunt for it not because it was on you but yeah i had to hunt for it when i was messing with it last week so that's pro tip one pro tip once you're dealing with mesh tape be sure to uh to do a little tag in a little ear mark it or whatever hold the ear mark over before you press it down or else that edge is almost impossible to find sometimes it really is but anyways so once we have our let me get our blanks set up yeah let's do that i'm actually just going to peel off a little bit of this cut a strip to work with now obviously if you guys are working with you know a much longer section you would i would probably not cut this so soon i'll probably just but i'm but for demonstration purposes yeah now one thing you guys will notice is let me come over here there is a solid line on my right hand side right and the other side is we'll say it's open-ended you know you can see the little tag ends poking out there right and on the top as well and then on my bottom which is now the top it's also closed so you kind of have to keep this in mind as you're doing the pattern because you want these you know for instance you want to do it at somewhat a diagonal right you don't want to do it this way because you're just going to keep going around the blank around the blank so you kind of have to set up this pattern at a diagonal and i think we talked about didn't we we were discussing earlier right in our in our pre-show meeting that depending on the width of the depending on the width of the tape is how sharp of an angle you're going to have to approach this right yep because technically i've seen you do this a number of times where you lay it out and you're cutting strips out of this right okay now and that's a good point you know we can certainly go with this width if you wanted to now you're really going to have to angle this out to make it yeah that's what you were saying earlier exactly yeah so if you did it like you know even at a slight angle with a the full width you know once you start wrapping this around it's going to immediately catch on the other side yeah right so you got to keep that in mind now you can certainly use this full width if you wanted to right or we can go in i'm just going to start with a new piece here and i think too there's you know there's going to be some difference based on if you're dealing with a diameter of blank like this or you're going to be dealing with a blank diameter what happened to the pro tip well i thought i was going to use that piece and then right you know falja so what i was saying was you know if you've got a blank that is a thinner diameter like this compared to this blank here you are going to have a little bit of a different pattern because you can choose different widths of the mesh tape i would venture to say you know you have a little bit more flexibility when you have a little bit larger diameter blank because when you have a thinner diameter blank it still works just as it would uh i see there's pro tip too just cut it cut your new tag in you only got what 300 yards of it is that what it was it's no big deal yeah um there we go perfect i'm sure it'll run out here in a second as soon as i see it's out right there perfect um so yeah you have the ability to adjust the pattern as hunter was saying uh with the width of the mesh tape so that's right i'll do a little bit longer piece here i'm actually going ahead and i'm going to cut this one okay i'm going to do it in half all right i'm going to roll that one over for you cool and like you said there are solid end you can you can use a solid piece or how did you say it one's with the edges that are solid or edges that are open let's go close and open how about that there you go closed and open and these pieces are not fixed so you could technically pull one of the pieces out and you'd get a single string like if you wanted to use an open piece or if you wanted to use closed on both sides you could actually take this one little tiny thread on the outside and grab it and open it up so for this one when i did cut it this time i actually have all closed ends okay it should make a little bit easier yeah i did do a shorter section again and that's honestly just because of our working room here but so let's give this a shot let's see if we can make it happen so as i rotate this around the first time i'm really just trying to gauge and almost make it match up i didn't go quite enough angle there try a little bit more because i guess if you really wanted to punish yourself you could cut that like only two squares wide and you have to go you have to go around around 100 times so obviously the goal is when you wrap this around you kind of want those edges to match up as close as possible that's pretty good not too bad there no down the cool thing is once you do run out of a piece since essentially this entire mesh tape is just one large grid of the same pattern right all you have to do is just make another little strip of course i can use this one i had earlier one little edge that popped up there and that's a good thing that by using the mesh tape it'll stick to the blank correct and you don't have to worry about it coming up or having to put color preserver on it things like that you certainly can it's not going to hurt the pattern but if you put a bunch of coats of color preserver on it you're actually going to be diminishing the way that the pattern will reveal itself because you're filling in the gaps a little bit you know it's not going to be it's not going to be a ton it's not going to kill the deal but uh it will kind of fill it in just a little bit we'll cut me a piece there too go for it so this is the quick and easy way to do it as you can see that's probably way too long for our purposes so i can actually come in with my snips i'm going to finish it off right there certainly when you do this if you wanted to you can have these edges so they are hopefully this is what you're going to show maybe in a second so these edges are square as you can see mine are not square they kind of almost point at the end and that's just from the doing the diagonal but if you started with a square piece you can have square edges on both sides what is that but that's the quick easy knock it out in a minute knock it out in a minute way that i do it perfect i like it i'm trying to cut a piece here that's got a closed in on it not all these matched up exactly perfect if i took a little more time and carefully laid each piece side by side so that the intersections matched up be golden well i can promise you i don't get it perfect so it is kind of hard i mean like i said you're dealing with these very very small thin fibers oh yeah and they do tend to pop up or fray or come loose so it's hard to get each one perfect [Music] but for the most part pretty good yeah sweet cool that'll do it yeah so that's my version what you got perfect i forgot to get this thing involved well we can get your so let's try to get that thing involved let me pull mine off um it should probably rip off pretty easy yeah i'm just going to shorten it just so that we've got room for the camera that's all okay i'm going to show you where it's you want to pop that out yeah i got to slide this in let's get a nice little close-up camera view yeah is it this way just turn it just like that yeah and of course all right forgot that we had this guy there we go it looks pretty in focus didn't it jay okay i know we kind of like locked it in so as hunter was saying and what i was going to show is the starting and the stopping because when you start and stop this thing the it's going to give you somewhat of a open space on this end here okay so you see there's a wedge here right it's not flush so this is one of the reasons why that i would do it before you put your grips on because then you can cheat without cutting this completely in this is also another reason why we like the crb pro power because we can just spin it right around now if you are if you do have grips on it you can come in and square these edges off i use a razor blade when i do it but you don't necessarily have to for example what i'm talking about is down here there's a wedge in there and right here there's a wedge in there so i would pick my first intersecting piece and i would just barely touch the rod blank it cuts this stuff cuts very very easily so you don't have to go gouging into the thing and doing all that stuff so don't worry about that okay now we want to make sure that this is pressed down before we start before we start wrapping so the good news is from there all we're going to really have to do is metallic because i'm metallic so i see we have a question up there actually okay maria all right what uh size thread works the best for this design so what um i think it really matters i haven't seen a huge difference to be honest with you i just really haven't um this is a uh i've used a d somebody had c i think at one time we were we were just testing yeah um i haven't seen a huge a huge difference where you're gonna see the difference is if you're going to use thread instead of mesh tape on on the approach correct okay so that for me is going to be more important on giving you a different pattern than the thread here so um now as we go and kind of start and stop this i always like to start out here off of this thing off of the mesh so you can kind of maybe get a running start it kind of helps you a little bit um it's just however you feel comfortable you can do it in a hand wrapper no problem you don't have to have the rbs pro i like doing it in the rbs pro it goes a little quicker you can do it by hand you can put a track on here like tc4 tc2 i'm going to hold with a bobbin because i wrap with the bottom a lot on the pro because i can have multiple bobbins and i can just wrap this color pick up do another one pick up to another one and we also have our little hover cam here and it helps if we just kind of show it with a bobbin and then the track you know so i'm going to start a wrap just like you would start any other wrap okay i'm gonna go around a couple times we're gonna pull it tight i think did i plug this thing in i think i did yeah so all right let's get it locked down no see what i did there started off too far it's only because we're live yeah right why don't we just do it live nothing ever bad goes you know nothing ever bad happens ugh well and two when i cut that metallic it pulled itself off there so all right there we go let's see if we can get this going here all right so we'll go around a little bit and then we'll cut it off now you do have to be careful because these little pieces of the mesh tape can come up so they do a pretty good job of sticking you can use some color preserver if you want but like i said you don't need to put a ton of coats of it and also you don't want to fill it in too much honestly so you can kind of see the pattern start to develop there right there how we looking jay good of course starting and stopping i'm leaving gaps in a little bit but don't yell at me too much for that guys all right made it to the end the suspense was just killing me all right you put a little tuck it away here [Applause] and that'll be that and i wrapped off of this one to show you why that you need to be sure you cut the uh the edges flush because it will show big time and you'll realize oh sweet i didn't cut it flush unless you're going to slide grips over it so down here you can see there's give a probe set out so here you can see that there is a very defined edge where the dragon scale starts right so you got that you know what i've got zoom on this thing oh hang on we're going in kids i got you stand by hallelujah y'all act like this isn't episode 73 no faith yeah right how we doing all right so now we're zoomed in so you see we'll use the pointy end so right here there's a very very hard edge this is a little extra there's your hard edge now if you would not have cut that we're going to slide down here to the other end and it's going to give you everything looks okay and then whoop you see this big triangle that comes out and then it fades in and it comes back out that's what happens if you don't cut it flush so just be careful either hide that under a grip or hide it under you know an over wrap something like that but don't don't let that go because that right there looks good but then you come around you go look what happened you got a big gap here so that's just a little you know something to be aware of but that's your dragon scale you can kind of see how it how it pops through there you know pretty uniform that's about that's about as you know close as you can get you could probably clean there's a little bit more of a square open square there because of the space between the mesh but that's pretty solid not too bad so that's it easy enough it's easy enough that's the hard part right there yeah yeah exactly and the best part about it is if you want to do it as a guide underwrap you want to do it really just put it anywhere and that's the best part you can you can even use that i've seen guys do just this as we'll call it their base wrap for even an underwrap or not an underwrap a um like a butt wrap or a cross wrap yes you know you can do a simple um you know diving diamond or chevron over the top of this and let this be like your base or your background of that wrap right um and get some contrast and looks really cool i love it really start tripping yeah that's it well but that's yeah that's a great point i love it good idea yeah good idea cool um let's see well i think that's cody's kind of question there yeah that exactly is that where you're going with that i was nice can you do a tiger out with the dragon scale i don't i don't know it's a tough one you definitely can do it um will that that dragon scale show through the tiger wrap i i've never done it i don't know i don't know that's that's gonna be one cody you're gonna have to do and then get back with us there because i think it would take away from it yeah at some point i don't because there's so many layers to it you you might drowned out that but i don't know maybe you'll have to do that we'll have to do it over the top of that one i guess use it as a base he's saying that's what i was thinking yeah yeah it just depending on how much of that shows through your tiger wrap is yeah that's the question i like uh i like where your head's at though always always thinking uh carrie's got a question does this work on larger diameter rods does everything line up like you have there it it does um this is a larger diameter blank here whoa hang on i'll back this out just a hair so that is a larger diameter blank there you can see the difference in diameter um and that one also lines up well it really just depends on how wide of a band you cut and at what angle of attack you do it but you could do this around you know something that's two inches in diameter if you really wanted to it just it'd just take you a little bit um but i would i would just adjust the width of the tape because like you said on that little tiny and i wouldn't say this is all that small but this smaller size blank outer diameter you tried to use the full width of that thing it just you just can't do it it would it would be so articulated like this i don't even know you couldn't even get it to wrap itself yeah it's more than a pain that's worth it it's easier in these small strips like you've cut here you know even that one's probably a little too big more more like that you know about a half right half of the the width of the stream i would say you know what is probably maybe six squares wide or something like that yeah yeah so really you could spare a square really you know you don't have to go too wide so yep that's good um what type of threads or color combos seem to make the dragon scales pop best um dave i'm going with metallics every time yep no doubt um and from there we're going to talk a little bit about how to set this up and not use the mesh tape and that will give you the option to have a higher relief up off the blank by using either 50 pound braid or a monofilament that just stands taller because a monofilament's going to be a thicker diameter it's going to be a little more round and it's going to hold its shape a little bit better than you know when you wrap over some of this rod building thread it compresses it a little bit and it doesn't have the diameter or the integrity that like monofilament would but yeah so that would be that do you want to give something away so you want to do another question let's do um let's do a giveaway all right all right so give away number two for the night we have a split grip handle kit um we have another 18 spool thread assortment kit and um a roll of the mesh tape and that's going to be dylan mcdowell from youtube dylan mcdowell perfect awesome love when the youtube crowd is in the building yeah all right so we are gonna do a quick tutorial whiteboard i'm gonna talk about how you would lay this out okay so first you're gonna need to pick an area right so we'll just imagine this being your area uh it's gonna differ between rod builds because you might have one that's four inches six inches eight inches whatever you're trying to lay down now if you're not confined to a very specific space you might want to make it easy on yourself and do something that is easily cut in half uh you know like eight inches six inches things like that because if this was six inches here you're going to need the circumference of the blank in the middle so um i'm going to go to the white board and we're going to talk about this okay how about that all right cool uh and i'll use this as a is a thing so all right so we've got a rod blank and i wanted to do this so that then people could like have some notes while they're doing it all right cool no glare perfect so we've got a rod blank here and we are going to put a dragon scale inside here okay so we're gonna call this in here eight inches all right and you're going to put a piece of tape right here at four inches so this is four inches right we're going to do half um that's going to give you a pretty good measurement on your circumference of your blind you're going to pick it right here in the middle now this is not something that i came up with so i'm not taking credit for this this is just something i was taught i know a few very veteran rod builders have done it this way good friend of mine also she does it this way she does beautiful wraps you know brie does that so um and sorry to cut you off there this is just if you're going to use thread correct or monofilament or braid this is not the um the cheat the fast no uh this is the mesh tape method right exactly this is this is going to be free handing it with any of those materials that you had got you so you guys have done this before you have put tape here and then you cut it and that's going to give your circumference of that blank now you can mic it you can use your digital calipers and do that but if you use the tape it's a little more forgiving because you will have the ability to have the measurement in your hand and not have to kind of go oh well it's you know back to your calipers and right all that and so you will then like i said you'll have it in your hand and you can stick it down onto your tape measure and you can use the crb butt wrap alignment tool because you will need that anyway so you might as well just take the piece of tape and put it right there on your crb butt wrap alignment tool that's something that for you know your cross wraps all your butt wraps it's it's great we're going to use that for this because we're going to use it to mark the blank and put graduations on where you're going to do this so i'm not a math guy i think you guys know that i'm also not a handwriting guy i think you also know that so we've got four inches here in the center of an eight inch span for just pure luck we're going to call the circumference of this blank is also going to be four inches and i'm doing this just so that i don't you know so we got easy math so we got a circumference of the blank is four inches all right now you need to decide do you want to have a two axis four axis eight axis wrap okay um if you're only doing like a two axis it's not going to look like a dragon scale it's just going to look like you're just doing cross wrap and just a couple x's on the rod like it's not going to do it yeah so if we're going to do an eight axis speaking of that handwriting thing so we have eight axis right we're gonna do eight axis so what we need to do is we need to take this 4 and we need to do 4 divided by 2 okay it's going to be 2 2. all right and then we're going to divide that in half again right one so we're gonna get one right so far so good okay then we're gonna cut that in half right sure i think that's what we're doing 0.5 so we got 0.5 okay and what you're gonna have to do is let me think because you can now now i'm now i'm caught under the heat of the lights because we were talking about it earlier where we went yeah that's right yeah all right so four and this can be inches of course four inches in circumference is a pretty big blank right so this could be four inches it could be four millimeters it could be whatever we're just using four so don't hold four don't hold four inches over my head or four millimeters whatever so we've got 0.5 now going to take that 0.5 to the rod blank and that's going to be your graduations so all of these little guys here down this rod blank are going to be 0.5 okay whether that is centimeters whether that's millimeters whether that's inches it doesn't matter could be feet who cares yeah it's going to be 0.5 now you need to take and put these graduations at 12 o'clock three o'clock six o'clock and nine o'clock so you'll have when you do it on the rod blank that's when you're going to get your butt wrap alignment tool out and you will lay it in the butt wrap alignment tool and you'll do a full line all eight inches of the span okay so you'll run eight inch span twelve o'clock turn it to three o'clock so we'll do we'll put a note here line 12 3 6 and 9. okay so you're going to put your line there then on that line is when you're going to put your half inch we'll call it okay um marks all right so now you have all of these half inch marks all the way across eight inches okay as you begin your wrap because you are doing an eight axis okay you need to start at zero or 12 o'clock so the one that you're looking at so now we're going to do what i'll do is i'll draw this will be the rod blank again hang on we'll maintain colors here okay so now we're zoomed in okay so we're gonna the red is going to be your line down the middle of the rod blank hopefully it's straighter than that and now you have little graduation marks okay let's just imagine that's even enough okay so here is zero and you can put a piece of tape or whatever so that line is this line and you will come in with your thread and you'll start wrapping thread will be black so your thread will come in and cross remember we're at zero so this is at 12 o'clock and it's going to go around and it's going to come back so one two three four five six seven eight it's going to come back around and cross here at i'll just call this eight all right so now you're going to be crossing your other axises as you go but we're counting off of zero so we're going to go around we're gonna cross at eight so then when this one comes through then you'll go here it's gonna go around and then you gotta come back right so you're gonna come back the other way and it doesn't matter where these fall and hit because as you come back another direction it might be i don't have enough marks here but then coming back the other direction it might be here but this one would be eight from where you cross that over here gotcha so you work your way back this way and then as you come back you can either choose to cut it in half so this would be one two three four so just like you went this way you would come back here at 4 right this would be 4 because 4 and 8 are related like that so then this one would be out at 12. that math is right right yeah so that's how you work and then eventually you'll fill it in and as you fill it in you'll get a tight wrap just like that now you don't have to do an eight axis you can do a four axis it's just going to be a larger opening it would look something a little more like this one because there's just not as many crosses okay it will kind of elongate the pattern well it would just the boxes would be larger right so instead of instead of the the boxes being you know like this and an eight they would be twice the size pretty much so they would be like this in an eight or a four so if this was an eight this would be a four okay and if you wanted to do a four instead of crossing at eight you would have crossed at four gotcha and you also if if you were doing a four axis you wouldn't have divided in half so many times got it so there there is also you could also cheat in that a little bit if if you wanted it to be an eight but you didn't want to divide down that many times you could do it in a four and then just keep wrapping and cut things in half but yeah then you depending on how the uh depending on how the marks are and you can start to get like a cross-eyed look and and things like that so hopefully i didn't lose anybody too much on that it's we're gonna do a show we talked about it today where we lay it out but that's kind of the shorthand version of it um and yeah so that's something without doing a calculator and then doing that starting off with a piece of tape cutting it there getting your circumference laying it down you can certainly do this with math but it also if you get a number like if this was not four and it was like uh 3.892 or something you can round that i wouldn't you know i would go to four if i had like 3.5 i probably wouldn't go to four i would probably just own it at three and a half um like you mentioned at the very beginning you know if you do a very easy eight inches as opposed to you know and if that overall length was 7.65 inches you start with that even round eight inches and it kind of makes the rest of the math a little bit easier yeah you know that this overall length is is not too bad that that doesn't really affect your your graduation if if this number here if your circumference number is a really weird number okay if it was like 2.813 or something like that what's half a 2.81 right so then then you're gonna have to do that in half of that that is then like you know 1.4 something and then you got to do what's half a 1.4 something and then so then these little numbers here start to get super weird because you know on your even if you're using you know metric trying to do like 2.1 centimeters and 2.25 or something like that it's going to get it's going to get very difficult gotcha you know if you were doing on you know an odd length here where your graduations weren't gonna hit like 0.5 is gonna hit well starting at eight or starting at zero and ending at eight um if not just end it out here if this was like you know 7.27 or something because you have a grip um that's gonna if your grip is going to slide on and you're doing this before the grips come on i would just then go ahead and continue them out here and just work those in and then just cover them up with the grip yeah otherwise it's like well that's you know just just for helping you keep everything spaced out um that kind of helps helps people so hopefully i didn't muddy up the waters with this but i wanted to show and talk about that there is another way out there to do it um and i would use you know monofilament i don't know if you know size d thread is you know is pretty good you know if you wanted something that had more relief off the blank you could use a 50 pound braid you could use monofilament things like that you know you just have to test it because we were talking with brooke earlier he mentioned this and said if what you're using is too thick in diameter the the whatever thread you're using whether it's a thread a monofilament a braid if it has too much diameter to it the crosses will have such relief off the rod blank that size a is going to jump off of the crosses right you know it's not going to cover them nicely uh and even size d you know depending on what you're using if if there's not enough of a little flat ridge on it or there's too much relief you're going to start getting little open peaks at right at the cross so what i'm saying is if this was across and it was really really thick monofilament and you're coming in here with this you know black thread right here at the peak you might get one of these and that's of course a very exaggerated um you know example but because this this spot right here is very very tall off the rod blank you have to be careful you might not be able to get that coverage so and then of course then that's going to peek through and that's not going to be good yeah so cool all right i hope i didn't booger that up but we'll see if i did i can bet i'll hear about it so all right um leo edward jr could you do this can you do this in the space between a split grip that's already installed then cover the ends with size a or that stick up too high uh phil right there in that first door there is the one that we used i already i put it in the split grip there i think it's a neon green rod blank should be leaning up right there do you see it so this is an example of a grip that was already put on um and you know the the good and the bad with this is you you might have it happen where let me show this here your ends down here are going to be wider okay so these trim bands if you're not careful and cut a really really good edge down here you might have to widen your trim band so it takes away from it just a little bit i think this is another one of the pro tip what not to do and it's not it's not wrong and it's not terrible it's just i would like to see there be a little less trim band to show a little bit more of the pattern very true you know what i'm saying yep so it was just something that i extended this out considerably farther than i would on on a built rod already you know you might not have a chance to adjust it but that mesh tape is very flexible you can run it all the way down and even run it up onto the grip and then give it a razor cut and then you know put it down there so you don't sorry so you don't have to have this really wide trimming so leo hopefully that answers your question there but you also said split grip that's already installed then cover the ends with size a to cover the inner with that stick up too high no you're gonna be fine yeah yeah okay that's what i thought yep that's exactly what you did there yeah and bobby had the same question yep uh what if i already have grips on the rod blank yeah i was not saying when i was saying to do this before you put your grips on i was not saying that's the only way to do it or that you have to do it that way it just in my opinion can give you a little bit cleaner look because you don't have to have such wide terminating ends there and you can kind of make it so that it looks like it just disappears up under the grips and that's whether it's a real seat whether it's a you know grip or anything in my opinion anytime that you can get away with putting aside from maybe a decal something very very simple anytime that you can get by with putting your decorative wrap if you plan on putting the split grip before you put the grips on you're ahead of the game i think so because not only you know say we wait till after the grips are on to put our decorative wrap on you're for one dealing with it's the same amount of space but it feels a little more confined you're working with two grips on each side so you don't have as much room to work with it's just easier to do it ahead of time before you put the grips on if you're able to um and just yeah those those seamless lines you know and just yeah looks really sharp i agree i think it's just a better it's just a better option yep so um and then from there you know the i don't put color preserver over the top of that um really none of the metallics per se have have one of those deals where yeah you know it's not a it's not going to force you into putting color preserver on it um i just go ahead and start putting finish on it i always though always do multiple coats and thin coats because technically you're trapping a bunch of little tiny air bubbles under there so what you don't want is if you put on a big glob of finish and go oh no i'm gonna i'm just gonna go ahead and build it all up in one no i wouldn't do that nope because you're gonna you'd be surprised how much air gets out in all those little tiny gaps so i would do you know the either threadmaster light or i would use you know regular pro coat um it's more of a medium build and i would put a very thin coat on and i'd probably you know use a little bit of heat that helps kind of get everything in there and run all the bubbles out before you start adding because you just even if you only use the mesh tape and stuff and it's it's not an extraordinarily long process i just hate to see decorative wraps ruined by bubbles very true so yeah yep um ricky in that silv silver dragon scale could you have inserted one or two strands of lime green this guy here yeah certainly could do you mean like side by side because if so you could absolutely run okay inlay almost yeah that's that's how i look at it so if you've got something like the tc2 or the tc4 where you can run multiple threads off the carriage at the same time just like we do in a tiger wrap you know tiger wrap you're using three so there's no reason why you couldn't do two silvers in a green a silver and a green you know i mean on tc4 you can do three silvers in a green three greens and silver whatever but you could lay different colors together as you run it out you could absolutely do that um that's a pretty cool idea i'd like to see how it turns out you know if i put sort of a a spiral wrap in it i would i would try to put maybe two or three of the same colors together and then the single band because it might space it a little bit sometimes if you put two colors there together so close and you do a lot of it it might blend it too much or it might make it look look weird but yeah i agree you almost want to treat it as like an accent color as opposed to just two colors side by side yeah you know like you said i think two at least two of your main color even three probably would be best yeah and then the accent color i could see that running out of the tc4 that would be cool you know three three of the same and one kind of an accent something just that makes it pop maybe we'll have to do that on our when we demonstrate the advanced yeah 2.0 yeah right dragon scale 2.0 so cool um all right any other tips on how to finish your app you said obviously you know multiple thin coats um you know even if you guys are using high build i would probably still do at least two three coats of high build yeah um because you know not only even if you're aside from using a floating decal the more coats of epoxy especially thin coats of epoxy the more depth you're going to add to that dragon scale and it's really going to help it pop you know if you go and just do one coat of high build or a couple coats of your uh you know um light build it's not gonna have that same effect no you're not and and i'll show you too this might let me see if this will translate under this that's a good example because so the red only has one coat all right put this down so i don't know if you can see it but it's very it's ridgy that's a word it's a uh that's a that's a rod building term technically so let me get a little zoom in here good perfect so you can kind of see on this side here all this way on the edge you can kind of see that there's ridges in it still you know it kind of you can see the way the lights hitting it over here um because this only has it's only got one coat on it so that's how i would start but you can see here there's your bubble okay see if i can get this around on the edge you can't quite pick it up maybe there but so there's your bubble and that is a pain because you could probably pick this out because you only have one coat on there but it it sucks let's be honest you know you get that bubble and that's just gonna it's gonna ruin your whole day honestly so that's what not to do you know we always try to show a what not to do but you could probably pick this out and then run it on a sander uh or actually i mean you would just sand it right here so that would be something that you could turn down get that bubble and then you would go back and put finish on that so that wouldn't be too bad at all now the alternative or the the second step of this this is not where you put your decal because there is not enough finish here so coming out of this i'm going to switch this around here okay so now we have this is smooth so you can see here kind of you're getting the reflection you know all here you can see how smooth that is this is now with two coats no i think this is three this is three thin coats so this is perfectly smooth i did not have to sand this one because i went and put three very very thin coats on here this is ready for a decal so you can see did fairly good with the alignment there but having it nice and smooth is what's really going to pay off for you in the in the decal so this is either ready to go you could always continue to put finish over it um but that's the difference so showing it with one coat showing it with three coats um this one is now ready for a decal or just to be done so that's going to give you kind of a difference in what it looks like so that you know what you're looking at when it's ready yeah um especially for a decal because it's got to be it's got to be perfectly flat yeah and even looking at this you know i'm sure you could nitpick this and find little spots where those um that mesh tape you know the fibers didn't align perfectly right but you know honestly there's there's so much going on and so much reflective um you know visual yeah you can't you can barely tell if anything is off in that pattern for sure so don't be uh don't be too hard on you guys you know if you're you're trying to get every little fiber matched up it's it's not worth it it's the end product is going to come out looking awesome yeah um especially when it hits the sunlight i mean those colors just go crazy yeah and this doesn't even do it justice i mean we're just here under studio lighting so take it out in florida sun it it is really something that is for sure so cool all right all right well let's do this doing a little giveaway last giveaway of the night okay grand prize we're gonna do um an mhx multi-option rod kit perfect along with the uh the 18 spool thread assortment kit and the roll of mesh tape um lucky winner alan cran allen cran c-r-a-n congratulations alan got a rod kit a spool assortment kit and some mesh tape to get started sweet that's awesome very priced absolutely cool all right so we had brian haggerty winning tonight congratulations we also had dylan mcdowell coming out of youtube and uh he just gave it away alan cran for the big winner tonight um so episode 73 we appreciate everybody joining i know it wasn't as long of a show as we typically have but we wanted to try to get you all started in something that maybe you haven't tackled before something that is a fun decorative item that really anybody can do this this is not something that is you know reserved for only the best rod builders it's it's something that beginners and advanced builders men and women anybody you know something that's easy something that doesn't take a ton of tools doesn't take a ton of time isn't all that expensive um you know to produce some cool patterns like this and of course you know you can leave spaces in it you can do all kinds of things yeah um if you've got a scrap rod blank if you've got you know scrap pieces of whatever play with it a little bit you know we had a couple great questions on can you do this can you do that with some of this decorative rod building stuff you know there's not a whole lot that you can't do yeah so and even as easy and basic as it is we still talked about you know if you want to add it under a cross wrap diamond wrap um you can add it under as an under wrap you know if you wanted to you can take a very simple and basic technique and even as a advanced rod builder you can apply it you know and use it as almost like a secondary or a base wrap under something else so many areas so many areas it's it's it's a very versatile decorative piece as you said so yep awesome now remember before we get out of here hashtag build to win is going on with the photo contest it ends june 28th that is on the rod builders workshop on facebook and you know if you're not on facebook we understand that's why we also come to you live on youtube but you know sometimes it pays a little bit so if you got to use your wife's or your husband's or your kids facebook maybe jump on there and uh enter a win you know you'll win uh some gift cards here to mud hole to buy some more cool stuff so that's it and all the products tonight that we use on the show are there at mudhole.com mhl stands for mud whole live i know very creative almost almost snuck by me there yeah mudholl.com forward slash mhl that way you can go through and you know pick the mesh tape and do that so you're not hunting too long on the website but you know if you go down the rod building rabbit hole throw a few more things in the cart there you uh we got we got blanks in i saw we do yeah we had a lot of blanks come in yeah um so those will be shipping out this week um for you lucky guys and girls that have these on on back order or looking to purchase them that was awesome um big shipping of blanks just come in so those will be going out soon um we got more inventory arriving every single day yeah i was looking at the schedule that you had that you were telling me about it's it's impressive tons and tons and tons um as always for those that watch the show but they want to do a little bit of reading maybe some step by step we of course we've got a blog i don't think the blog gets enough press no it does not so you know for those that you have seen guffey we call him guff blogman uh he's got a link to do three simple ways to add dragon scale wraps um that is just blog.mudhole.com uh that is going to be an absolute wealth of knowledge not only for the dragon scale wraps but just all kinds of stuff there's great photos there's great how-to's it's all kinds of stuff like that um you know the three simple ways to add the dragon scale also four great ways to to refine your rod builds don't forget if you've got a rod that somebody gave you that's a factory-built rod that's ugly that you don't like it's got some gaudy decals on it throw a dragon scale over it yeah put a floating decal maybe like i love mary or something whatever we'll do a custom decal for you don't have to take that old decal off just cover it up easy enough over it perfect all right so that's it for episode 73 congratulations to the winners what else you got anything i think that's it um i know we were a little early on this one we're just two weeks but we will be back next show on the 20th 22nd it's we're now june 22nd i think it's tuesday yeah so because we're going on the striper trip we're going up to the harbour gonna catch some stripers so uh we're gonna do that and it'll be june 22nd 6 30 eastern from the penthouse as always so anything else i think we got a couple topics in mind but as always if you guys have any suggestions no doubt throw it in the rod builders workshop group and um you know might pick it up one time and of course if not there are 15 000 people in there that are yeah happy to answer your question if you have one that's that's the best part about the whole community for sure camaraderie and the help absolutely so all right well we had uh we had the birdman in here birdman stayed right yeah we had guff and taylor in the war room of course steve was in there helping out i'm sure um we had phil and jay on the ones and twos and of course my left-hand man hunter mckamey guys thank you so much for joining us i'm chris adams from the penthouse for mud hall live we'll see y'all in a couple weeks three weeks for episode 74. thanks for watching take [Music] care you

Channel: Mud Hole Custom Tackle, Inc.

Views: 8,649

Rating: 4.8150287 out of 5

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Id: rHAlEcTaFx4

Length: 81min 25sec (4885 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 01 2021