DON: Thank you for the reply. As I mentioned to Jerry I plan to build my struts out of cut off Fly Rod material (my other hobby is building fly rods). The fiberglass flyrod is 100 times stronger and lighter than the wooden struts in the kit. I built inserts, like I saw on your post, and epoxyed them in. I took plyers and tryied to pull out the insert and could not. The fly rod scraps also bend a small amount under stress, kind of like when I have a 3lb rainbow trout on, but will not break.