10 Year Rods

I am going to chronicle the process of making the 10 year rods, so check back regularly. This is a process that will take about 6 months. Making 10 rods is not difficult, but not easy either and since I am actually making more than ten rods it will increase the difficulty level. I have made the decision for this series to actually make about 15 butt blanks and 30 tips. I will then select the best ten butt sections and 20 tips for these rods. I will destroy the rest.

When making quads, its a little different than hex's, there is a lot of waste when it comes to the strips. Due to the angles and processes not being as refined as hex making it causes there to more waste with the strips.

The top pic is the culms ready to get flamed. There are actually more culms outside the pic that will be needed for the tips.

In the lower pic you can see the butt section strips all sanded ready to go. There is one batch of tip strips also. When dealing with so many strips (I have done this before) you can get them mixed up from one another. So in order to avoid this the butt sections are colored different than the tip sections.

Why does it matter that the strips stay separated? Several reasons, the main being I hand select each set of culms for either tips or butt sections. I believe all builders do this and all probably have their own theories of what to do. I know many quad builders want the XL poles for their quads, I don't necessarily. I am not going to get into what I do here, because I think its one reason why my rods have a better action than most bamboo fly rods. There are many inconsistencies in the bamboo, no one can master this aspect!

Next week I will post a video of the demo 10 yr rod in action. I let one of the Carpenter Bros. use it on a recent trip catching 12" trout. One theory I have about this is if it holds up to a 10 yr old buggy whipping the hell out of it and it doesn't break its a good rod!