Building The Rodfather Brookie [drc #4 9ft 3wt 4 pc Fast ~ ERN 3.4 AA 67°] 26Oct20

With temps dipping to 0° and 5" of snow I hunkered down inside and finished the drc#4, aka the Rodfather Brookie. This is a custom built 9ft 3wt 4 piece rod built from a Rainshadow Revelation RX7 medium fast blank with matte charcoal coloring, a nickel silver REC NBS uplocking reel seat with removable fighting butt and Cal buckeye burl insert, and chrome stripping & snake guides & tip top. I wrapped it just as the Rodfather Cutty but in matching charcoal & silver, with spirals on the ferrules and thin accents on the guides and hopeful 16", 19" & 22" length markers. As described prior, I fashioned a disturbing spiral pattern into a custom full wells grip to match this rod. All in, parts are <$200 but with my time and vision, this thing is priceless. :) I've mated the GF Brookie 3wt to a Lamson Guru III 1.5 reel in silver loaded with SA Mastery MPX line, which weighs 1543 grains (first 30 ft) ~ this actually might be a little much for the  Brookie as when remeasured finished its 36" deflection point still occurs with just 30 cents, or 1160 grains. Mastery MPX lines are a half line weight heavy (3t is 1280 grains) so I may need to seek a lighter 3 weight as the Brookie is a nearly righteous 3 weight rod. When the snow clears I will know... nonetheless, it is light and balanced perfectly and swings sweetly. While I don't imbibe while rod-building, a little completion celebration was warranted and I chose the 4 Noses Science Project brewed with undisclosed experimental hops... hazy tastiness with a smidge of sweetness and floral nose.

 

Here are some images from the build out process and components. The REC reel seat with butt is cool and almost disappears into the similarly colored granite above... uh, that's by photography design yo. The grip was built from sectioned-glued-sliced cork rings in burnt and regular and then assembled on the mandrel in my vise with a tiny offset when adding each ring to the stack. I then turned the grip in my lathe into my favored full wells shape. The blank, guides and thread arrived and I could start wrapping.