I have another thread going about custom stuff... This aint them... A couple years back I had two shakespeare rods that seemed to "twist... The guides each off center til by the tip the were rolled horizontal... Never saw that in all my years... Had em re wrapped and fine to this day...
The other twist mystery occured a couple days ago. Chaos aluminum but 30-50 trolling sticks... The reel seats on both had "migrated" to the left by about 20 degrees setting the reel off center by that much???? Tried to muscle one of them back straight and the gimbal simply fell out without all that much pressure on it???? Contacted them and they will replace... Just curious what the hell happened there. They were fine in september and have been stored at outside temperature no colder than 45 orhotter than about 90 degrees...
Any clue what could set up this twisting crap???... I store my rods vertically in a rack...
That I can see on the shakespeares... They're about ten years old. Went 9 years with no issue then it happened overnight. No problem since fix.
The buts though are a mystery. It looks like the inside "nub" that connects with the ferrule on the base of the rod has some how turned about 30 degrees off center... on both... Then the one gimbal simply fell out and what looks ike crystalized epoxy fell out too????
Usually when reel seats or gimbals move it's due to inadequate epoxy being used initially or the mix of the epoxy was not correct.
You can usually repair a lose seat by drilling a couple of small holes in the body of the seat and squirting a couple of bottles of super glue into the holes. The idea here is to fill as much void as posable with the glue. For the gimbal, just remove it, clean up the inside of as much glue as you can, roughen both the gimbal and the rod and re-epoxy the gimbal. I recommend slow cure epoxy for this - not 5 minute.
With regard to twisting; that is usually due to a rod not being built correctly to the blank's spine. But, that doesn't sound like your problem, as re-wrapping would not have fixed it. So, I'm guessing that the guides were not tied on with enough tension and were therefore moving when under pressure.
By the way, both of these issues are common with inexpensive factory rods (like ugly sticks). Which is a good reason to fish with "art" as it really does typically mean a better rod.
I have had the exact same thing happen on 4 Chaos Rod butts. On two occasion while fighting fish the rod started spinning on the butts. In my opnion the butts are not high quality. Have them replace them with Aftco or Stuart.
It appears the metal insert is not properly seated in the rod butt.