Drilling cork for those difficult grips

[BARICK]

Thought I might share some recent wisdom.
I'm in the process of building a rod for a customer and the Fuji SK2 split reel seats will be going on. I wanted to build a new hood front end grip but was trying to come up with a way of boring out the damn 20mm hole that the cork will slide onto. So I came up with the following;

-I bought a 20mm and 28mm spade drill bits
-Loaded a 45mm thick piece of timber onto my drill press and bored a hole with the 28mm spade drill at a depth of 40mm.
-Ground down the wings of the 20mm spade bit.
-Meantime, i had already turned my cork at 40mm length and 28mm diameter.
-I then taped the cork for extra strength incase the sides blow out when I'm drilling the hole.
-Inserted the cork into the hole in the timber and made sure it was a tight fit.
-Then slowly drilled the hole into the cork at a depth of 28mm.

Came out prefect. Fits nicely on the front end split reel seat.
The reel seat is a size 16 in case you're wondering.

[Owen]

Nice job
Thanks for sharing.

[Mark Fisher]

Hi John,

Nice to put a face to the name at the SEARBS meeting. You do some really top shelf very professional work which you need to get out there so people can see it. I'm sure you will end up with more work than you can handle. Great job with idea you have posted above.

Regards
Mark

[BARICK]

Absolutely was a great get together and thank you very much for the comments. I'm working on getting those rods out there.
Cross fingers soon.

Barick