<<< continued from page 1 Once the guide is securely held in place by the thread, carefully remove the masking tape and any sticky residue that is left behind. After a few more turns we’re ready to begin the spiral trim wrap.  If you choose not to do a trim, or spiral wrap, you can simply continue wrapping until you are ready to slide in your finish loop. To make a spiral trim wrap we take a short (4” or so) piece of contrasting color thread and slide it in under the thread until it is aligned with the spine.  Metallic thread works great for trim bands such as this. Next, we rotate the rod a few times to secure the trim thread.  As we want to spiral wrap to be centered on the finished wrap, continue wrapping until we are almost at the center of what will be the finished wrap.  Gently push the main wrap thread so that it is located to the left of the trim thread, while holding the trim thread straight down and keeping gentle tension on it. Now we simply spin the blank until we have the number of trim bands we want.  For this rod we’re doing two, but one or more is just as easy.  We do want to overshoot the starting point slightly as you can see in the picture.  By holding the thread at the spine with a thumb or finger, and gently pulling the trim thread to the left and under the main wrap, it is held under the main wrap.  Spin the two or three more times to secure the trim wrap, then trim the tag end. We now can continue wrapping the guide until we are approximately 5 turns from the end.  At this point we take a short piece of scrap thread, make a small loop and pull it under the main wrap. With the loop in place, we wrap the last 5 or so turns until we are near the guide loop.  Stop the wrap about ¼ turn beyond the loop.  Again, with a thumb or finger, hold the thread firmly at the loop, then cut the main wrap about 2” from the blank.  At this point if we take our finger off the thread our nearly-finished wrap will unwind and we’ll have to start over, so be careful!  Next, take the 2” of trimmed tag end, slip it through the loop.  We then gently pull the loop to our right (wrap side) which pulls the extra 2” of thread underneath the last 5 turns of the wrap and holds it in place.  We can now let go of the thread with our finger as the thread is secure. With the wrap now secured all that is needed to finish is to trim the remaining tag ends.  For this I use a pair of fly tying scissors but a careful hand with a razor blade works well too.  Carefully pull back the tag end so that a small gap opens in the main wrap, and trim the tag end as close to the gap as possible.  When the main wrap springs back, it will help cover any extra thread that wasn’t trimmed. With the tag ends trimmed, take a bodkin or other smooth tool and gently rub back and forth over any gaps in the wrap.  This will even out the thread leaving a nice, tightly packed finished wrap! Although we were careful to keep the guides centered as we were taping them into place, they will often move slightly as they are being wrapped.  Using gentle pressure we can easily shift them into perfect alignment with the spine.  Sight down the blank after finishing each wrap to make sure all guides continue in a straight line.  Carefully adjust as needed. Sometimes when wrapping you’ll get a guide foot that wants to stand off of the blank.  These can be difficult to wrap up onto as the thread prefers to skip off the guide foot and slide underneath.  continue to page 3 >>> Hatches Magazine Subscription Price: $6.95 for each issue The Premiere issue is ready for shipping & the Fall 2008 issue will be available September 1st.