Rod Racks and Rod Storage

Rods are long, expensive, and stored badly in almost every house that owns them. A rack made to your own rods costs very little more than a rack made to an average, and it is the difference between storage and a slow accident.

The usual arrangement is a corner of a garage, a set of hooks, or the tubes leaning against a wall behind a door. It works until somebody moves something, and then it stops working expensively.

What a rod actually needs is straightforward, and once it is said out loud it is obvious.

The one thing that matters: no pressure on the blank

A rod blank is designed to bend under load and return. What it is not designed to do is sit bent, unloaded, for months.

Carbon is tolerant of this and cane is not, but neither benefits. The damage from bad storage is rarely dramatic — it is a rod that has taken a slight set, a tip that no longer sits straight, a section that has crept. Nobody notices the day it happens.

Which produces three rules that govern everything else on this page:

• Support at the butt, locate at the tip. The weight goes on the butt; the tip end is held from falling sideways and carries nothing.
• Never clamp the blank. Anything that grips a rod tightly enough to hold it is gripping it tightly enough to mark it. Cradles, not clamps.
• Never let a rod rest on its tip ring. The commonest single fault we see, and it is entirely a matter of where the rack puts the rod down.

Vertical, horizontal or angled

All three are correct in the right room. The choice is usually decided by ceiling height rather than preference.

Arrangement	Suits	Watch for
Vertical Butt in a cup, tip located above	Rooms with height. The most compact by floor area, and the quickest to use — one hand, one movement	Needs the ceiling. A made-up 10ft rod wants better than 10ft of clear height plus room to lift it in
Horizontal Laid in cradles along a wall	Low rooms, long walls, cellars and outbuildings. Also the kindest arrangement for cane	Eats wall length. Needs enough cradles that the blank is supported, not spanning
Angled Leaning in a raked rack	Rooms that are neither tall nor long. A good compromise and often the best-looking	The rake has to be right or the rods walk. Butt cups must actually retain

Vertical is what most people picture and it is frequently not what the room can take. A four-piece 9ft rod broken down is a different storage problem from the same rod made up, and it is worth deciding which of those you are actually going to do before the rack is drawn.

Made up, broken down, or in tubes

Three habits, three different pieces of furniture. Most houses need two of them.

Made up

The best argument for a rod room. A rod that lives made up is a rod that gets fished, because the barrier between deciding to go and going is thirty seconds rather than fifteen minutes at the car.

It demands the most from the room: full length, clear height or clear wall, and enough spacing that rings do not touch. Rings are the reason rods should never be racked tight against each other — two rods pressed together will mark each other’s whippings and eventually the blanks.

Broken down

Shorter, easier, and what most travel rods do anyway. Sections want to be located individually rather than bundled — a four-piece rod dropped into one hole comes out with the sections rubbing.

In tubes

The safest for the rod and the least convenient for the angler, which is why tubes end up in a heap. Tubes rack beautifully because they are rigid, uniform and hard-wearing: a simple pigeonhole run does it, sized to your tubes rather than to a guess, with the labels facing out.

Cane is a different problem

If there is cane in the collection, say so at the outset, because it changes the design.

Split cane takes and holds a set far more readily than carbon. Stored vertically for years on a warm wall it will bend, and it will not come back on its own. Cane also dislikes swings in humidity, which affect the glue lines and the varnish rather than the fibres.

So cane wants horizontal storage in cradles, well supported along its length, out of direct sun, away from a radiator, and in a room whose humidity is reasonably steady. If a collection is mixed, we usually rack the carbon vertically and give the cane its own horizontal run — different furniture in the same room, which is a perfectly good answer.

How we set a rack out

The same way we set out a gun rack, and from the same kind of list.

What we want to know is: how many rods, what lengths, whether they live made up or broken down or in tubes, whether any are cane, how many are two-piece against four-piece, whether reels stay on, and how many more you expect to own in five years. Everybody underestimates the last one.

From that we set the spacing rather than defaulting to it. Rings and reel seats are what dictate the gaps — a rod with a large stripping guide needs more room than one without, and a made-up rod with the reel left on needs a butt cup deep and wide enough to take the reel foot without the rod sitting proud.

Butt cups are lined, usually in felt or baize. Tip locators are lined too, and shaped so a rod drops in rather than needing to be threaded — a rack that requires aim is a rack that gets used carelessly.

How it is built

Quarter-sawn solid oak, walnut or mahogany, or a hardwood built for paint, made at our own bench in Suffolk and finished in our own finishing shop. Solid brass or bronze where there is ironmongery.

Rod racks are frequently part of a larger fitted room rather than a standalone piece — a run of racking over a bank of reel and tackle drawers, with wader storage at the wet end and a tying bench under the window. Drawn together, it reads as one room.

Where a fishing room adjoins a gun room, we build both in the same timber and the same finish and install them in one visit. The fishing room page sets out the whole thing.

Common questions

Setting out rod racks: the figures

Rod racks are simple to make and easy to get wrong, and everything follows from one principle — no pressure on the blank, anywhere, ever. A rod supported at two points near its centre of mass keeps its action for a lifetime. A rod hanging by its tip, or wedged into a hole that grips it, takes a set within a season.

Cradles are lined in napped wool and cut with a generous radius — the rod sits in them, it is not gripped by them. Butt cups are drilled deeper than they need to be so a wet cork butt can drain rather than stand in a puddle. Nothing in a rod rack should ever be a tight fit.

Cane, which is a different problem

Split cane takes a set far more readily than carbon and should be stored either fully horizontal on three supports, or vertical tip down in its bag and tube — the opposite of what most people assume. It also hates heat: a cane rod stored above a radiator or in a sunlit window will move within a season, and the varnish will go milky in humidity. Cane wants a cool, dark, dry, well-ventilated corner, which happens to be the same corner everything else in a fishing room wants.

Rods, tubes and travel

If you travel to fish, build for the tubes rather than the rods. A rack designed only for made-up rods means the tubes end up in the hall. We usually run a made-up rack at high level and a tube drawer or open bay beneath it, so the two live together.

Between waters, everything wants drying properly before it goes away — see Check Clean Dry. It is why our fishing rooms have a drying bay rather than a cupboard.

Sporting Cabinetmakers is a trading name of Reeve & Co Interiors Ltd, Stonham Road, Mickfield, Stowmarket, Suffolk IP14 5LS.