Speaking of G Loomis

So... in my quest to begin rod building, I'm going to build my first one with a kit from mudhole that I got for Christmas. It's a good'un made by St Croix. While doing all this and practicing to make sure I get a decent rod for my first build I'm keeping an eye toward building what would hopefully be my nicest fishing rod down the road once I get the process down. That being said, I already have a couple really nice rods, one a G Loomis bronzeback model and another real nice Fenwick that can hang with the Loomis and I actually like the handle a bit better...

Discovery #1 - G Loomis don't sell blanks anymore

Discovery #2 - So as I'm looking for where to get the really good blanks, I discovered Gary Loomis ain't even AT G Loomis anymore and has nothing to do with them. He now has another company called North Fork composites. http://www.northforkcomposites.com/ And they sell blanks.

Now all I need is to find out what the best options are for a handle and guides and I'm almost there.

But...

perhaps I'll focus on building my first rod first.

I KNEW I shouldn't have started down this road :)

There's another place called ArkRod over in Harrison Arkansas that will build you any kind of blank you want and they are very high quality rods. come on out here and fish with me and I'll take you over there and you can meet and talk to the guy who runs the place. He wouldn't come out and just say which ones were which, but he did tell me they do some high end rods for Falcon and then pulled a few blanks for me to look at let me come to my own conclusions. They ran about 100s buck apiece. I'm pretty sure they're on line.

BKB

Well... ok dammit!