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Tiny tool

I made this tiny tool for attaching yarn strike indicators to your leader with the help of a short section of silicone tubing - think ‘New Zealand Yarn Indicator’… It’s nothing more than a large darning needle with one side of the eye cut off, and stuck onto a shortish handle. You use the hook thus formed to draw the leader as a loop through the silicone tubing. Once the loop coming out of the end to the tube is large enough, you stick a piece of yarn into it, and draw the loop back into the tube, doubling the yarn into an indicator ‘ball’, and locking it into place. The fit is such that you can easily relocate the indicator as needed, or remove it altogether.
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Display rack

I’ve made numerous rod racks, for all my rods (plastic and bamboo). Most of these are utilitarian to a T, just to store my rods, and in some cases to have them ready to grab when I go fishing. Some were made to display individual rods at shows, and incorporated different ‘mechanisms’ to protect the rod in the rack from occasional pilfering - like the new rack I showed in the previous post - a 2-rod rack for doing a side-by-side comparison of rods made from Tonkin and Lô ô bamboo; this rack has a split central shelf with holes that prevent removing individual sections from the rack when closed, and can be ‘secured’ by screws that ‘lock’ the central shelf to the uprights - not completely secure, but more than sufficient to prevent occasional pilfering. However, I now also wanted to make a more elaborate display rack, that would enable me to keep some of my go-to rods ready for grabs in a more accessible, visible location. I came across a picture of a nice wall-mounted rack and decided to...

Side-by-side comparison

As mentioned some time ago, I have been experimenting with Lô ô bamboo for making rods. Lô ô ( Bambusa procera ) is a giant bamboo from Vietnam and has many of the same characteristics that make Tonkin bamboo ( Pseudosasa amabilis ) such an excellent rod building material. In addition to that, its average diameter is significantly larger than Tonkin’s, and its internode length is such that 3 piece rods up to 8 ft in length can be made nodeless-spliceless, each section made of strips from a single internode. Its only drawback is that it has a slightly lower Modulus of Elasticity, requiring a slight change in taper dimensions to match a Lô ô rod to a Tonkin rod made from the same taper - multiplying the overall diameter of the taper by a factor of 1.035 usually does the trick. Last summer, I made two Lô ô rods based on my existing tapers, adjusted accordingly, a 3 piece 7.5 ft rod for a #4 line and a 3 piece 8 ft rod for a #5 line, and tested them extensively in Norway. The rods performe...

Nets

Several different style nets - all ready for the water…

Waara V-block

I usually check my strips for dimension (both correspondence to the design thickness from the taper plan and consistency flat to flat) by carefully taking measurements with a digital caliper. I know that this is less than accurate, since the apex, which is always one of the reference ‘sides’, is very easily crushed, resulting in an undersize reading (the actual crushing of the apex itself is not so much a problem). There are better, more accurate ways, to measure dimensions of a (equilateral) triangular strip. The most common approach among bamboo rod makers is to use a so-called Waara v-block, named for the rod maker (and machinist and inventor) who popularised it and manufactured them for sale. The principle behind it is that you put a strip in a 60 degree v-groove in a block that has a cutout for a pair of calipers, supporting the apex side of the strip with the groove, rather than by its apex alone, and measuring the thickness of the strip-plus-block. If you know what the net thick...

Bobbins

Quick random message. I ran out of empty plastic bobbins/spools to refill with Gütermann Skala 240 (UNI 6/0) and Skala 360 (UNI 8/0) for making furled leaders, and for fly tying. Fortunately I have a decent supply of locally grown Buxus - too thin for ‘real’ woordturning, but more than adequate for making fly tying bobbins…

Update hollowing jig

 Some time ago I showed my hollowing jig for (female) bamboo ferrules. That version consisted of a small slab of wood with a groove, the depth of which defines the resultant wall thickness, and a spokeshave to remove material from the inside of a strip, down to the desired wall thickness. While functional, that small jig wasn't completely satisfactory, for a number of reasons. In addition, the (unmodified) spokeshaves were less than totally satisfactory, as they kept digging into the surface of the jig when reaching the final wall thickness. So I updated my hollowing jig, making it from a large, heavy slab of well seasoned European oak (from a 50 year old discarded table, sawn to length and planed to thickness (using a large workshop jointer and a lunchbox thickness planer). I made a number of grooves with a plunge router, of different depth (wall thickness) - on one side for general hollowing (wall thicknesses roughly between 2 and 3 mm), and for female ferrule hollowing on the ot...