A Couple of New Rods

Well, this weekend was a tough weekend on the building. I had most of Saturday to work, the wife had taken the kids out for the day. It didn't go as planned. I started working in the shop and I had some problems right off the go. After about an hour of problems I gave up. I went and did some other things around the house. When I came back to it I saw a rod in the corner of my workshop that I had put up sometime ago because of orders. I thought I would give it another go. It was a 8'1" 1 weight rod. I had broken the butt section doing some sloppy tests on it. So I rebuilt it. I am not real sure why or where someone might want a rod like this, but I thought it was fun to work within this length and weight. I taped guides on this morning and WOW! I really like this rod. It has a nice medium fast action and with a tip right at .058" it has enough strength to hold the line up right. I have been thinking about sending this out as a demo, but I keep coming back to the thought of just fishing it myself. Blank weight on this rod is 1.9 oz.

The top rod in the photo is the 8' 2 weight demo that I am just about to send out to the first person to try. I believe I have talked about this in previous posts about how excited I am about this rod. This is another rod that I hope to spend a lot of time with this summer. It has a medium fast action as well and tip size right at .062". The same parameters apply for this taper as the 1 weight. The finished weight on this rod was 3.19 oz.

A small paragraph about weights on a rod. I find it hard to stay much below 3.1 oz when using standard or even mini ferrules. The spanish cedar insert I have for these two rods is even lighter than using cork! I don't stabilize the cedar because it adds weight to it. I am under premise that it is lighter than cork and more durable than cork so it should be better to use than cork. If I am wrong on this it wouldn't be the first time. :-) I also have mastered the Carbon Fiber ferrule. I have done this with the spey rod I am working on. This also came on Saturday's break down. I am not going into details on what I have done, but I should be able to make a rod with fiberglass/carbon fiber ferrules in the 8'6" range and keep it right around 3 oz. I have a 8'6" 3 weight that I took out to the Henry's Fork this summer that I fished with on the river that I plan on retrofitting this rod with to see how it performs. I am very curious to get the spey rod out and see how it performs.

The last note about the fiberglass/carbon fiber ferrules is that I want these rods to be affordable. I don't want to make rods that cost thousandS of dollars. Its not who I am and what I want to do with my rods. I have told some people this story, but here it goes again. Before I started building I fished with nice rods. The nicest of these rods was several Mario Wojnicki rods. They were beautiful and great rods, but I never felt right fishing with them because of the cost. As a school teacher at the time if I broke one of them I would be out of a lot of money. I had even bought some very nice reels to go on them, like a Bogdan. I never felt right with that much money on a rod/reel. I hope I can stay true to this philosophy.