Bushings/ Arbours in Rod Building

Bushings/ Arbours/ Arbors!

Masking tape has always been the traditional medium for taking up the space under reel seats, grips and with the resurgence of glass blanks when fitting stents, but, it has it’s limitations and quite often fails overtime. You often find collapsed making tape bushings when removing old reel seats from water ingress, a sign that not enough or poor quality epoxy has been used during the build process. I’m not saying don’t use masking tape, just be careful with it if the gaps are over 1.5mm and ensure that the tape is completey covered with good quality epoxy and plenty of is used on the ends of the insert and reel seat skeleton.

So, what’s the alternative? For the last five or so years I’ve been using scrim tape, which also goes by fiberglass tape, plasterer’s tape and drywall joint tape and it’s readily available from DIY store’s everywhere. Scrim tape is made up of woven fiberglass threads into a mesh, is self-adhesive and the benefit of using scrim tape is that the epoxy will fill the voids in the mesh and create a very strong and permanent bond from the inside of the reel seat or grip through to the surface of the blank. The only place I still use masking tape, is when installing stents into blanks, and that’s only to stop epoxy seeping out and down into the blank during the curing process, I still ensure that any masking tape is completely covered in epoxy.

Scrim tape used on a stent fitted to an FRC Ogawa 764 blank with both scrim and masking tape visible