MickD

I never take mine out. Since I store the boat inside, no need to take it out. But I've been there too. Grandson to Grandpa: "Grandpa, the water's getting pretty deep back here."

Lots of people using braid with little to no problems , but there are some things you need to consider. First, braid has no stretch, so feeling finesse bites is much easier than with mono or FC. Much better feel of the bottom, too. Whacking on a snag with braid is much harder on the rod than with other lines, so keep in mind you could break a hi tech rod if too aggressive. Braid is much thinner for its pound test, so when breaking off, it's best to wrap the line around something like a dowel a few times rather than around your hand. You can get cut from braid. Most who use braid like a mono or FC leader, but not all. Some just tie to the braid. If you use a leader you need to learn to tie a good knot to join the line and leader. Forum strings about the knot often get dozens of different opinions. Mine is that the double uni is the easiest to tie and very reliable if you use small enough leader to allow it to pass cleanly through the guides. if it won't pass (it's a pretty big knot) then learn another. My favorite for micro guides is the FG knot, but it is not an easy knot to master. Many ways to screw it up. Search youtube for "tying the FG knot." Finally, you will cast so much farther with braid of 15 pounds or less than you do with 12 pound mono, you will be amazed.

Ardent reel butter. Any sewing machine oil. 3 in 1 oil. Not olive oil. Yes, just about anything will work in a pinch, but for top performance-long term lubrication, go with something that was designed to lubricate.

Breaking or unraveling? Leader breaking at the knot? After the break, what is left, and what does it look like? Doing more aggressive snapping or jigging now? I never have mastered that knot, but I know if I put the tag end through the loop from the wrong way, it fails almost immediately. But my failures were always unraveling, not breaking of leader or braid.

Sounds pretty clear this is a characteristic of the T wing reels, not a defect. I have one and have not noticed this. Is it possible that because I still have my thumb on the spool when I engage that I don't notice it? My experience with mine has left me with the conclusion that it's the best casting baitcaster I've ever had, and I've had a goodly number of different brands.

What he is experiencing is not the line slipping relative to the spool due to braid's low coefficient of friction; he is experiencing loops of line during retrieve which are not going onto the spool, but are wrapping around the body of the reel. Especially with retrieves that put little tension on the line as it's being retrieved. The only thing I can think of for retrieves like this is a limper line than the current line.

The longer the rod the better, the advice on 6-9 and longer is very good. The rod also has to load properly. Your current rod is not loading much at all from what you describe. For custom builders there are now much better options than building from fly blanks. Look for the recommended line test (should go down to 4 pound test) and lure weight (should go down to 1/16. Rods will work pretty well outside the recommendations, but don't stretch them much for this very challenging technique.

Just ordered a 3 amp on-board charger yesterday, thanks, Mick

It may have casted like crap, but I maintain it was not because of a little misalignment. Ever put a two piece rod together with the one piece out of alignment by a few degrees? Did it cast a lot different than when perfectly aligned? I have done it many times and it is always the appearance that tips me off, not the casting quality or lack of it.

Of course it sounds like a battery or charging issue, but what specifically is going on to cause a battery or charging issue? Could be a number of things, which is why he asked. And, sometimes things are not as they seem. So to figure it out, look at all aspects of the issue. Bad battery? It's new, probably OK, but have it checked to find out. Insufficient time on a charger? Insufficient amperage on the charger? If using a trickle charger, could take forever. Connections all clean and tight? Is the motor OK? If the shaft turns freely, that's a good sign. If it doesn't, it could be using lots of power more than if it were OK.

How does the prop feel when rotated by hand, turns freely and with basically no feeling of drag? It should turn freely. Describe your charger and charging technique. In particular, how many amps does it provide? If it's a new battery, did you buy it locally? Piece of cake for the battery store to check its condition.

A spiral rod is supposed to look that way, but a regular wrap is not. It would bug me forever, and sounds like others are similarly affected with the curse. I had a spiral one time that I had wrapped with way too big of guides, and it performed well, but when I found out the guides were way oversize (early in my building days), it bugged me until I rewrapped with the right guides. No problem now. You're right, it's all in the head.

Unless I'm mistaken, I have not seen where any attempt to allow Kastking to react to this issue has yet been made. Might be a little premature to start giving them bad reviews. Every maker has at least a little problem now and then.

You seem to have a good understanding of what you're getting into, so go for it. It is a very rewarding hobby, and I, like you will, truly enjoy using the top quality rods we build. Please send me an email or personal message.

Keep in mind that the first guide on a casting rod is the line guide on the reel, essentially a micro at the reel. Comparing slight mis-alignments to this would lead one to believe that they won't affect performance much if at all.

I have never used a power wrapper, used a cobbled setup for many years. Finally a couple years ago I got the track and rollers but not the motor. Until you decide that you want to stick with rod building, I would not invest in an expensive setup. Try one of the kits from Mudhole or Getbitoutdoors for starters. There are some very good factory rods out there, have caught a bazillion fish, shop the sales this fall for a good factory rod.

I'm not sure you would ever detect a performance problem, but for me I'd see that misalignment every time I used the rod and it would grind on me. Get it replaced and that won't happen to you.

A class outfit, always very responsive and helpful. Their wrapping thread has a lot more stretch than others, which has some advantages. I trust their fishing lines are very good, too, but expensive. The Pureline has 12 strands in 14 pound test and above. ghoti, any braid samples you don't want will be put to good use here. :-)

For the record, ice does not make them stick tighter. Ice helps. As counter-intuitive as it seems, ice shrinks the material making the ID of the female section bigger and the OD of the male section smaller. Might not work every time, but it is theoretically the right solution.

I had current somehow leaking to the water faucet, its path I don't know. When I would touch the metal faucet with bare feet and a wet brick surface, I would get a tingle. That circuit was not a GFI circuit. What I do know is that fixing the ground wire fixed the issue and since then a pro electrician re-did the wiring at the box when he put in an all-house generator, never mentioned any problem, and everything has worked well since. Relative to this problem, you sound like a pro, and I defer to you.

I got about 45 Volts AC shocks off an outside faucet once, traced the problem to a faulty (not solid) ground to the well pipe. Filed the corrosion off the well pipe, reattached, and good to go. Point is that a faulty ground may be a problem, too. In fact, I think a short would act differently than what you are observing, but that's just an educated guess. As stated above , proceed with caution.

Expandable plug, right? If you cannot get the expanded plug to fit tightly, so tightly that you cannot remove it without "unexpanding" it, then the sleeve is the wrong diameter or the plug is the wrong diametger. The nylon sleeve mentioned earlier takes a 5/8 inch plug. The brass one takes a 1 " ("standard" size) plug. The two parts are not interchangeable. You may have a ! inch sleeve in your boat and are trying to use a 5/8 plug in it. What is the ID of the sleeve in your boat?

What you saw may have been pieces of a deteriorated plug. I had one crumble once. You've got to answer the question Does the plug fit snugly?

You say you have a smooth hole. If you have that you already have the sleeve, I believe. The 64 dollar question is Does your expandable plug, the kind that someone earlier described as a "lever on it", fit tightly into the smooth hole when the lever is operated. The answer to this is either yes or no. If the answer is yes, then your leak is somewhere else, not through the plug or its mating to the existing sleeve and you do not need to add another sleeve. If the answer is no, then you have mismatch between your plug and the existing sleeve. The mismatch can be a plug too small or a sleeve OD too large. The expandable plugs are designed to be shoved into the right diameter smooth hole, and when the lever is operated, will expand to seal from water entry. They don't screw in. They are cheap, and all are the same size as far as I know, at least for fresh water outboard sized hulls. If it does fit tightly you don't need a sleeve at all. But if it fits tightly and the boat still leaks, then the leak must be coming between the OD of the sleeve that is already in there and the boat hull, through gaps in the cobbled epoxy job, most likely. (or have you considered it's coming in somewhere else having nothing to do with the drain hole?) If the leak is between the existing sleeve and the hull, then the black fitting shown above, with the proper prep I mentioned before, should work. It utilized a threaded plug with an O ring, you can see that in the picture. It's housing must be water tight to the hull, which is what I tried to say before. To repeat, the first question you have to answer before going any further is: Does your plug fit tightly into the existing sleeve? You cannot sidestep this - it has to be answered. Yes, or No. If unclear, come on back and we'll work on it some more.

The picture you sent shows an obvious (to me at least) cobble job repairing the drain hole area of the hull by epoxying in a sleeve which would accept a plug. It is very possible that your leakage is coming between the cobbled-in sleeve and the hull itself, not between the plug and the tube. If your plug now seats tightly into the hole then the leakage is most likely the tube and the hull. It appears to me that the fitting suggested by a poster, which has a housing which is screwed to the hull, will fix it IF its housing is big enough to totally cover the cobbled epoxy AND the surface to which it is applied is smoothed out to allow good, constant, contact between it and the hull. You would apply a high quality caulk between the housing and the hull. If what I think is going on adding this fitting would not require you to disturb the old cobbled fix; you would be covering it up so its flaws would no longer allow leakage. One way to test is to cobble a cork or rubber plug into the sleeve you now have to temporarily seal to the I.D. of the sleeve that is cobbled in. If you do a good job on that temporary plug, and the leakage continues, then the leakage is between the cobbled-in sleeve and the hull.