Rod Going Out Today

This is a 8'2" 5 weight that is going to a customer in Alabama. I haven't dipped in awhile, but I remembered quickly why dipped rods look so good! It does add weight to the rod, but it also has many advantages. In the next few days I will post some more pics of another rod that is being dipped as well.

Inside Taper and shirts

Here is a picture of an 8'4" 3 weight that I am working on. When hollowing rods you can also include an inside taper to your rod. I take a lot of things into account when deciding how much to hollow and what spacing I should use with that spacing. A couple of things to look at are the size of fish you will be fishing for, what type of line you will use and weather conditions (windy). The depth of hollowing also determines how far down the tip I will go with the hollowing process. If I am hollowing to .040" of an inch you can go down pretty far. I will do that on a lot of my 8' 3 weight tapers just because of the type of fishing most of the owners will be doing with those rods. I will probably stay around .060" on tips for 5 weights and above. Hollowing to different depths is very easy to do with my Elder hollowing mill.

Please remember if you buy a rod from me you get a free t-shirt. My new shirts just came in today! If you don't want to buy a rod the shirts are $30. 

Change

After some deliberation I've opted to make a small change to my rods.  The signature will be shortened to "Carpenter" in order to maximize the natural beauty of the bamboo.

The next series of rods will be crafted with a lighter color bamboo.  Please see the lighter cane on the two quads pictured below--an 8'2" 4 weight and a 8'4" 3 weight.

The Quads Are Coming!

I will have several hollow built quads for sale over the next couple of months. The rod I really like is the quad version of my popular 8'4" 3 weight.

Spey Rod with Carbon Fiber Ferrules

This rod is a project I have been working on for about a year now. I started off with a trout rod using this form of ferrules and now I have employed them on this spey rod. My major objective is to save weight off rods that would normally be heavier. This is going out to a friend in Washington to use and get feedback from. I don't see myself making a lot of these rods (spey), but its fun to do something different than trout rods all the time.

Reel Seat Hardware

Well, the 2 wt demo didn't last long! The second person trying it out bought the darn thing. He loves light line rods and it was exactly what he was looking for.

I spent the morning cleaning the shop and organizing reel seats. I am not sure if I have enough hardware or not. I use two different types of reel seats. The hardware that you see in the box is what I use for my lightweight seats. They come with a Spanish Cedar insert. The nicer seats that I use are purchased from Bellinger or Snake Brand. I just received my first Buckeye Burl seat from Mike at Snake Brand and its stunning! I will definitely be ordering more from him.

I hope to have some photos up soon of my Spey rod with Carbon Fiber ferrules.

I am now up to about a 9 month wait.

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.