hey konnichiwa youtube bill faulkner with faulkner custom rods here uh and finally tackling the series you've all been asking for over and over i get more requests for this topic than anything else and that is applying finish so complicated topic important topics i'm going to do a series of three videos the first which we're doing today is going to be about how i apply guide wrap finish i'm also going to do a second video about how to apply a butt wrap finish and then finally wrap it up with a video on common finish problems and how to fix them and sort of tips and tricks so um it's really interesting i get probably 10 times more requests for videos about finish than anything else uh and when i'm with customers or other builders and we're looking at my rods i get more people asking how do you apply your finish than anything else and so it's a complicated topic it's an involved topic but we're going to try to dive into it i think one of the really important things about finnish is it's one of the most accessible ways to for a non-builder to assess the quality of a custom rod or a rod builder's skill and i guess the example i'd give you is i've never painted a car in my life but i can look at a car and immediately tell if it has a poor paint job if there's bubbles in it if it's lumps and imperfections if it's not high gloss finishes the same way you do not have to be a rod builder or even an angler to look at a rod and if it's got a poor finish job it jumps out at you the other thing about finish is it's the final step in the process right so it doesn't matter how effectively you selected components shaped your guide feet set up and designed a rod selected com you know the blank your guide train everything else is moot if you fail at the finish line literally no pun intended so you you really need to master your finish regardless of whether your builds are very elaborate and involved or whether they're very sort of stripped down and traditional and basic because a poor finish job just sort of indicates poor quality of the entire build whether that's actually true or not um the other thing that makes me a little nervous when we get into finnish and some of the aesthetic things is this is highly subjective right so there's more than one way to do anything you hear me say that every time and what's what's perfect to my eye might not even look that good to your eye and that's okay but i think ultimately what we're talking about is as individual builders we want to master our techniques such that we can develop consistency so what i'm after whether whether what i think is a perfect guide foot finish is perfect to you if you walked into my shop and looked at 50 rods they all look the same okay the double foot guide finishes look the same single foot guide finishes look the same and so that's what i think we're after so i have no interest in sort of arguing about what's too heavy or too light or how far we should overlap onto the blank or any of that i want us to really focus on mastery and that mastery is exhibited and sort of demonstrated through consistency so when you can get the finish to come out the same way every single time guide after guide rod after rod you've mastered it whether you've mastered the look i like or not totally up to you but i want to help you focus on how you can develop that consistency and mastery and i'll show you what what i think mastery looks like and what looks good to me so a couple of key things i'd say key things to doing it my way but i think these are key things to do in it anyway and one is you got to be absolutely consistent if you want a predictable result you need to do everything exactly the same way every time right so that means you're going to measure and mix exactly the same every time you're going to apply exactly the same way every single time and you're going to go to the length of managing the conditions in your shop i have a small space heater and i keep my temperature and humidity very consistent it's about 74 to 76 degrees at all times those things matter right so focus on repetition and consistency you can't be constantly changing variables and expecting it to come out the same way the other thing about even guide foot finish in my experience regardless of what product you're using you've got to be willing to use at least two coats and so i have conversations with people say man this is awesome how do you get this guide foot finish i said well at first coat i know two coats man that's a lot of trouble you don't want perfect finish very much if you're not even willing to do two coats after all the work you've put into the rod then i can't help you right but in my experience regardless of product there's no way to get a perfect finish without using at least two coats the only time that i don't use two coats is when i use three or more coats on really big or heavy rods so just close your mind to the fact that you need to use two coats and then you know i think the only other thing is i use heat the application of heat in my finish process both for guide wraps and for butt wraps and we should just get some disclaimers out there heat can be dangerous it can burn and hurt you it can ruin your blank it can ruin your finish i'm using very little heat applied very gently uh in a very consistent way but full disclosure in about 1997 i completely melted the tip section of a loomis uh nlx fly blank and it nearly killed me because that was a 500 blank at the time um and and i ruined it it was my fault now they were gracious and they let me replace it at a reasonable cost but you can use too much heat and ruin things you can burn down your house you can scorch your finish so um you can also use these same techniques and principles without heat and it's almost what i showed in this video but i don't want to be insincere and i don't want to be accused of sort of teaching you one thing when i'm actually doing something else so i am not responsible or have any liability for anything that goes wrong for you trying these techniques and using heat or anything else so you need to use common sense and you need to be very careful and i'm sure you can so uh with that let's dive in all right so what is perfect guide finish so to me it's complete even coverage of the thread wraps with no thread poking through no fuzzies or imperfections i think you want even coverage off of the thread onto the end of the blank with very consistent and even overlap on both edges uh and from guide to guide we obviously want no bubbles in the finish especially next to the guide foot or in the tunnel uh we want even though we want the thread completely coated and encapsulated we don't want it too bulbous or football shaped and you don't want too much run out under the guide foot to me both of those look sloppy and then to me you also want the finish to get to be proportionate in diameter so if it's a very thin tip section of a blank then we want a pretty light coat and if it's a big beefy guide and a thicker you know near the butt section i think it's okay for it to be a much thicker finish and much heavier um and then you know you just want absolute consistency from guide to guide each guy on the same rod and from rod to rod so that you just start doing it the same way getting the same result every single time all right so what are we going to need first you're going to need a high quality finish and i've tried them all i've used them all the only things that i will use are flex coat products or the new gen 4 from access outdoors which is outstanding this technique works with gen 4 it works with flex coat scs ultra v or high build probably work with light build i just haven't tried it uh you're also going to need some mixing cups these are one ounce and some syringes to measure the epoxy with uh free syringes come with every bottle of g4 you buy which is pretty nice flex coat also sells them and you can find them at most of the rod building supply houses and then finally we're going to use a spatula to uh both mix the finish and apply it with and so this is a dental a flat dental cement spatula i'll put a link to where you can buy some down below but i prefer the ones with an octagonal handle so they don't roll off your bench and i prefer the ones with the stiff rather than the thin blade in terms of thread for the rod that you're going to see me demonstrate on we're using a hytina st wrap nylon size a in color uh number 323 which is a violet a real vibrant purple and then for trim and accents i'm using hytina aurora metallic in size a in color 1414 which is purple but the aurora is a color change thread and this change this thread flips between sort of a purple color and a teal blue color and then for guides on this one we're using uh fuji alkynites in the corrosion control uh cc finish uh these are cc lkwag16 through eights uh very short footprint uh high performance guide and then size ccldb6 heavy duty single foot micros and finishing with a cc mn86 tip top which is my preferred configuration for slow pitch jigging rods all right so you know i talk about the consistency i'm going to show you by my watch exactly how i measure my finish so what we have here is three parts three cc's of part a and part b of gen 4 finish from access outdoor products and so i've measured out my syringes i've put it in my cup i have started my stopwatch and now i am just mixing it you need to adjust the speed you're mixing so you can go as fast as you want as long as you're not introducing bubbles uh the bubble release is so good on gen 4. i'm actually you can see i'm i'm mixing pretty quickly here i go more slowly with the flex scope products but you're going to get it thoroughly mixed either way just try not to introduce any more bubbles than you have to this is subtle but you also see that i've sort of cupped the mixing cup in my left hand my hands tend to be pretty warm and i find that holding it rather than just holding two fingertips putting it in the palm of my hand and cupping it that way sort of warms the finish and makes mixing easier so if you can see i'm still getting streaks but i'm just going to be mixing this and i'm mixing in a counter-clockwise direction because i'm right-handed this is the way i mix every single time and i'm going to mix for about a minute and 15 to a minute and 30 seconds and i'm not going by time so much as i'm watching to see when streaks disappear so they see it's about a minute and 17 seconds my streaks are mostly gone i'm still just seeing a few and as soon as i don't see any more streaks i'm going to start scraping the side of the cup and it took about a minute 21 seconds there so now i'm just holding the spatula stationary against the edge of the mixing cup and rotating it this helps make sure i scrape the bottoms and the corners and my cup has two little corners kind of the bottom corner and then a ridge above it and i'm making sure i put the tip of the spatula in both of those and you'll see new swirls start to form you'll see kind of the you can see that only took about 20 seconds or a little less and now i go back to mixing in the palm so i'm just going back and forth mixing between stirring up right like this as well as scraping the sides of the cup and i literally follow this procedure in these times every single batch of finish i mix so mix up right for about a minute 20 minute and a half till the score you don't see swirls anymore anymore scrape the sides of the cup again i've mixed for what is that about 30 40 more seconds now i'm going back to scraping the sides making sure there's not any part unmixed and again the spatula stays stationary against the edge of the cup and i'm just rotating the mixing cup to agitate or mix the finish and once i get to this point about two and a half minutes i'm going to scrape the spatula to get anything that was stuck on the spatula the whole time stick the spatula back in the finish wait a second for the finish to kind of climb up so i don't start streaking bubbles through it and i'm going to mix vertically again and so i'm going to continue to do this and at this point i'm not seeing any more streaks or swirls i'm pretty much done i'm just gonna keep mixing till about three minutes or a few seconds over scrape the spatula and we're done all right so now we're going to start applying the finish and a couple of things i'm going to start applying finish pretty heavily from the tip of the guide foot you want to work uh from the outside edge of the guide foot in toward the guide ring and what this does is force bubbles out of the guide foot tunnel and sort of help you saturate the entire wrap um at this point i'm putting on a lot of finish pretty heavy but i'm putting it only on the thread wraps i'm not overlapping off onto the blank at all with this first coat um i'm gonna try to show this from a couple of different angles but you know i think the keys are don't be afraid to load up the spatula pretty heavy and then um i'm keeping the spatula pretty vertical and by keeping my right hand and the spatula pretty still and rotating the rod under it i'm able to have a lot of control with exactly where i put the finish in terms of pressure and again you see i'm going to start on the outside edge away from the guide ring and work towards the center so i'll start on the outside edges and work towards the ring which means you start on the left for this side of the guide and for the tip most side of the guide you're starting on the far right but you're just going to kind of adjust on each guide to make sure you work from tip of the guide foot in towards the ring in terms of the pressure i'm applying this is like less pressure than you need to make a ballpoint pen work you'd make a very light pencil line so i'm really just touching it i'm not you know messing with the burnishing of the thread or packing or moving threads at all just very gently floating over the thread and applying a coat of finish and again this coat's heavy but we have uh the thread is not saturated um the guide foot tunnels are not saturated there's been no run out under the guide feet and so um you know it's okay to have it heavier than you think you need right we're going to go back and remove excess and that's essentially the key to this technique thoroughly coat and flood the guide wraps not onto the blank but just the guide wraps and rotate it for a while let it saturate let it flood the coat and then we're gonna go back and warm it gently and remove excess so pretty much you see i'm doing the same thing over and over the holding the spatula still in a nearly vertical position with your hand sort of gently resting on the rod blank gives you a lot of control you just have to spin the rod under you and you can very easily you know keep the thread right excuse me the finish right where you want it which in this case is on the thread wraps only not onto the finish and so um the only thing that i'd probably note is i'm moving pretty quickly i'm not trying to i've just done this so many times i have a lot of familiarity with it you'll probably move a lot more slowly at first and that's okay and you'll kind of learn the limits of how fast you can go and stay under control versus when you get too fast and things start flying away on you you start coding out onto the rod blank um and so it's nice to have a couple of little pieces of paper towel here and some rubbing alcohol so here i've accidentally gone out onto the blank and that's fine i'm just gonna wipe it off it's not a big deal as long as i have those paper towel square is ready so have some paper towels cut up into i don't know one inch squares or so about the size of gun cleaning patches for a center fire rifle um and some rubbing alcohol like we've talked about before ready at hand and you can just you see i cleaned up that spot where i accidentally went off onto the blank the reason i want to do that is it's going to impact how i'm able to edge and get overlap onto the guide excuse me onto the blank in the next coat of finish so on one hand you know is it a little perfectionist yes but it impacts how straight an edge we get um another thing you may notice i'm kind of constantly rotating the rod remember that you have applied finish pretty heavily it does run and sag and flow and so if you stop for too long then the finish that you have already applied further towards the butt which as we're watching this video is to the left of the rod may sag and run off or drip onto your lathe if you're not careful so regardless of whether you're applying finish or not or you're grabbing your paper towel or repositioning your rod be mindful to continue to rotate the rod every so often and don't let it sag so much that it's going to drip off and so here we've moved from our our size 16 and 12 and 10 and eight double foot guides and now we're on our first size six ccldb guide and it's really the same thing just make sure you thoroughly coat um all of the thread with plenty of finish but don't go over onto the guide foot too much don't go over onto the blank too much and this is really all there is to it for this first coat um and i'll show you the remainder of the guides makes for a bit of a long video but hopefully it will be abundantly clear for you and and i'm just going to continue this process up the rod until i've completed all of my single foot guides when we've completed that we're going to let it rotate for a while just for a couple of minutes and we're going to go back and start applying some heat and removing the excess all right now here's where we diverge from the typical a little bit and we're going to start applying some heat so all i'm doing here is very gently and you can't see i'm going to change the camera angle for the next part so you see it but i'm putting very little heat from a constantly moving bic lighter directly under this guide and it doesn't take much heat and it's going to begin to run and sag and i'm just going to grab the excess off the top of the guide foot and then remove everything that will sag so here we go again another guide same thing i'm just gonna and it looks like the lighter is not quite under the guide because the parallax of the camera but it is keeping the cigarette lighter constantly moving several inches beneath the rod you see me put my finger over it to feel the heat make sure i'm not getting it too hot as soon as it starts running and you'll see bubbles come out you'll see it start to sag just take a little bit off the top of that single foot foot and then remove the excess it sags and there you go and i'm left with just enough finish to completely saturate the wrap fill in the guide foot tunnels and nothing extra and that's all we need for our first coat and so all i'm doing here is just working my way down the rod gently warming each finish the finish on each guide very gently until i see it begin to run and sag and then i like to rest with the guides up when i let it sag to remove the excess because it helps bubbles release if you stop with the guide down uh it doesn't it doesn't help the bubbles get loose uh that are trapped beside the guide foot and so again just warming gently rotating the rod and i seen a spot that i've sort of missed here where i didn't get some finish in on that safety locking wrap behind the guide foot so i'm just touching it up a little bit no problem if you see things as you go just correct them again back to the cigarette lighter constantly moving never sitting still and it's several inches beneath the blank you can't tell that from here but just warm it up while rotating until it starts to sag stop with the guide up remove the excess and then immediately flip it 180 degrees down and let it rest for a second it'll sort of even out and so that's really the process uh with coat one that's all we're doing is um is now we're into the double foot guides and we're gonna do the same process and we'll do it one side at a time just be mindful that the second side will get a little bit of heat from the heat you apply to the first side so you won't have to use as much heat for the in this side that i'm heating the double frame or double leg side of the guide first and so the single foot side of the double foot guide which is to the right here towards the tip is going to require less heat because it already got a little with the other one so again rotate it warm it gently once it's flowing and sagging i'm going to stop with the guide foot up i'm going to remove all the excess that will sag by touching the spatula to it and then i'm going to flip it 180 degrees so the guide foot is down and we're just going to continue that for all the guides and once you've done that for every guide go back and look at them make sure they look okay you don't have any bubbles or dry spots or problems then we're going to put it on a drying motor and you see we're about 24 minutes in on the clock from starting to finish and you're generally pretty good there at 74 to 76 degrees most of these finishes are going to start to get thick and slow down on you around 25 to 28 minutes and they're going to start to be pretty unworkable usually around 40 minutes so you don't have to be in a big hurry but you do need to sort of not waste time and keep moving and so we'll we'll wrap up this guide and then we will go to uh the second coat from here now change the camera angle here hopefully this is going to be helpful um all i'm doing now is i've let the first coat dry for 12 to 24 hours and now i'm just inspecting and i'm just looking at the wraps right and you can see we got a really good even coat of finish it looks pretty good right now it just doesn't overlap onto the onto the blank we've got no bubbles beside our guide feet and i'm just checking for fuzzies and if i've got any fuzzies i'm going to use a clean sharp razor blade to cut them off but just a little bit of inspection here to make sure everything looks good can save you a lot of heartache down the road because this is the this is one of the benefits of two coats now is a great time to fix any problems if you've got any fuzzies any stick ups anything like that you can trim them off right now with the razor blade and you're good to go all right now we come to the controversial step so now i'm applying my second coat and what i've done is mix a coat exactly like we mixed the first coat and then i've let it sit for 16 to 18 minutes and you can see it's thick it's the consistency maybe a pancake syrup or honey and that's what i want and so i'm gonna after letting it sit for 16 to 18 minutes in a 74 to 76 degree shot when it starts to get thick i'm gonna go back and apply the second coat and again like the first coat i'm applying it very heavy to the thread wraps only and i'm gonna do that for every single guide starting at the butt and working to the tip so again you got to just grab a big sloppy uh globular finish put it on and you're not trying to get it too perfect just make sure you get pretty heavy coverage all the way around the thread wraps um you know this step of allowing the thread to set for a while before you apply it i started doing this because what was happening with my second coat was i would mix it and immediately apply it and it would look perfect then i would put it on the rod dryer the turner and come back and check it two hours later and it wouldn't look good it would have flowed and moved and run and it was had run out too far under the guide feet and where i had good coverage onto the blank and the threads were covered the very edges of the wrap were poking through and i was just having trouble where uh the finish was kind of moving on me and so i developed this technique i kind of call it freeze frame finishing but essentially by letting the uh letting the finish set for a while before you apply it you're deliberately sort of limiting the pot life and then here in a minute we're going to warm it a couple of times and that's going to ultimately force it to set up so it's going to immediately set and stay the way we want it to stay so the right thickness the right amount of run out under the guide foot and um no thread edges showing or anything like that so again this takes some getting used to but it's really pretty simple once you're comfortable with the spatula you're just taking a heavy glob of finish and while holding the spatula still and vertical to the relative to the rod blank you're just slobbering on a big fat coat of finish onto the guide wrap only not the rod blank and you don't really need to worry about how it looks right now you just need to get really complete coverage with no dry spots and you want a pretty fat bulbous you know football looking coat of finish and i'm moving my rod support so you can see better so it's not in the frame the whole time probably should have done that sooner sorry i'm trying to figure out these camera angles for you guys you see what i'm doing all right so now we're gonna start warming it so with each side and you see the the lighter is a good four inches below say the rod blank i warm the finish to it just starts to flow the second it starts to sort of look liquid and flow and you see it thin out now i'm going to edge my wrap and again i'm holding the spatula completely vertical and i'm holding it right against the edge of the wrap on the blank and by using this thick finish that i've just very gently warm it's going to help me you'll see it just wants to keep a straight line and a consistent edge and i get a perfect even edge now i'm going to warm it for the second time and this time this is the warmest i ever get it i'm going to warm it until it's really flowing and you can see uh the the other guy i'm not working on is flowing really well and i'm gonna once i've got it good and warm i'm gonna remove i'm about to have a drip off the one i'm not working on i'm gonna remove all the excess flip it 180 and that's it that finish is going to freeze and it's going to stay just like that now i don't have to since i've already worn the second guide the second side of this guide i'm going straight to the edging of it and again i'm just holding the spatula very vertical against the edge of the thread wrap which is very clean from the first coat of finish and i'm just rotating the rod with this spatula loaded from finish i've already put on the wrap and what that gets me is a very consistent thickness and straight line edge all around the blank now i'm just again warming it until it's just going to start to flow and sag a little bit you can see it sagging there that's it and then guide up let it sag as much as it will it looks like i may have got a little bit of finish on my hand here so i'm going to wipe it off once it's sagged all it's going to sag i'm going to remove everything that'll come off i'll even touch the other side again now flip it 180 yeah it looks like i got a little bit of finish on my finger and touch the rod blank so just clean it up it's not a big deal and there you have it now by virtue of letting the finish set for 16 or 18 minutes before i started applying it and then warming it you see it's not moving it's not sagging it's not changing it's sort of frozen just like that and that's how it's going to look once it sets so again here we go we're going to warm and again very gently on the warming here as soon as you see it start to sag or run even a little there you just see then you go to do your edging and i always start with the edge away from the guide foot first and you see i'm going pretty slow but as long as you got finish this is kind of a hard thing to explain but when you try it this finish is really thick and almost kind of coagulated at this point and it wants to stay together and it won't wander out and make it hard to get a straight edge like it does when it's uh really thin and hasn't set for a while it's just if you try it you'll see what i mean it's very very easy to get a straight edge a finish all the way around the guide blank i'm sorry the the rod blank and that's what we're after so now i go to warm it a second time and this time i'm getting it pretty warm i don't want it to just barely flow like i did at first i want it to flow pretty well get pretty liquid and then once i've got it like that again stop it with the guide foot up let everything that will sag and come off sag and then i'm just going to lift it off the bottom with the spatula for small single foot guides you need to be a little careful uh that you your spatula may be thicker than your guide wrap is long and so you don't want to splatter finish or you know mash it against the rod blank so be a little mindful of that but this technique works really really well and you can see i didn't begin to warm the second part of this two foot guide wrap because it was already sort of flowing a little bit from the heat applied to the first side and so that's fine we're just gonna get it barely flowing we're gonna edge the guide foot side and then the guide ring side and then we're going to warm it to get it this is the part where you got to be careful you shouldn't smell looks like i got the line not quite straight so i'm going to go back and clean it up a little bit there and again it's very easy to clean up and keep consistent because it's sticking to itself and it's not as thin it's got much higher viscosity you should not smell the finish if you begin to smell the finish or smell something that smells like finish burning stop you're using too much heat and again the lighters constantly moving and the lighter is not that close we'll let it sag as much as it will again here remove the excess and really that's all there is to it once you've finished doing this for all the guides you're going to put it on the i like a 6 rpm turner and let it rotate until it's set all right so uh there you have it uh that's the fcr way of applying guide foot finish hopefully that was helpful i know it's a little bit different but uh if you give it a chance i think you'll like it a couple of things if you have not already subscribed to rod maker magazine you need to do so it is amazing but uh specifically as it relates to this issue if you look at volume 18 issue one there's an article in here called freeze frame finishing where this exact technique is described in a lot more detail than i could go into in the video and so uh if you want to really perfect this technique i would highly encourage that you subscribe to rod maker and you can find or if you just want to order the back issue volume 18 issue one you can find a lot more detail than even i was able to go into in the video you can run out of time with this finish by virtue of letting it sit on the second coat for a while and then applying heat you're done around 40 42 44 minutes typically at 74 to 76 degrees so if you have a really long guide i'm sorry really long rod with a lot of double foot guides break it up into two coats you know do half of it in the first second coat and then do a second second coat for the remainder of the guides or whatever if you somehow have trouble and you're moving slowly and the finish starts to lock up on you and it's not cooperating just stop back off and do another coat right i typically can do about 14 to 16 wraps in one coat so that would be eight double foot guides or you know 16 single foot guys just kind of depends usually it's combination of both uh on most rods so you know just kind of plan your work and it's okay to go slow it's okay to not get the entire rod done uh with in that second coat round with one batch you can do multiple batches if you need to so hopefully this helps appreciate you watching please like and subscribe and uh stay tuned uh next week hopefully the same day i'll drop the next video and that's exactly how i apply uh butt wrap finish so until then tightline stay safe thanks for watching