Hello everyone,
I’m so glad I discovered this forum; I hope some of you may be able to help me. I am a fairly accomplished custom fishing rod builder and have quite a bit of decorative thread weaving experience. I am also pretty comfortable creating geometric and inlaid wood blanks for turning decorative wooden grips for fishing rods. I’ve always felt though that I’d like to incorporate leather work in my rodbuilding.
From the rodbuilding people, it seems that a small number of people work with snakeskins to create decorative patches of skin adhered directly to the fishing rod blank and then finished with two-part epoxy such as this Fewer people spiral a band of leather over rod grips like this Even fewer rodbuilders attempt simple braids like this I am not aware of anyone creating small scaled embossed fishing images for application over grips.
There just doesn’t seem to be much crossover of leatherworking skills into rodbuilding. When I chanced upon your forum, I thought I would pick the brains of the experts here. What kinds of leatherworking do you feel could be creatively adapted to embellish fishing rods? Could simplified tooled or embossed images similar to the engravings on fine shotguns be done in leather in a small enough scale to retain sufficient definition and clarity? I’d love to learn what you think is possible for a highly skilled or master leatherworker, not an absolute beginner like me.
