Schroedinger

I got a request for an ultralight spinning rod, and as far as I’m concerned, the best ultralight bamboo spinning rods in history were designed, made and marketed by French giant (at the time) Pezon&Michel. Notably the Telebolic BB1, BB2 and BB3 models. The BB3 is a 10 g spinning rod, the BB2 a 6 g rod, and the BB1 a 4 g rod. They also had a BB0 3 g rod and the UltraLeger. The UltraLeger is not really a spinning rod - it is more suited to float fishing at a distance. The BB0 is likewise too soft and wimpy to be used for lure fishing. Moreover, the BB series of Telebolic rods are of a staggered ferrule design, which made some sense when making ultralight rods with metal ferrules, but not so much when you employ integrated bamboo ferrules or other non-metal ferrule types. The request was for something a little lighter than the BB1 - essentially a 3 g rod. As such I sat down to design a 3 g 2 piece bamboo spinning rod based on the BB1, but scaled down (as already laid out by Richard Wa...

Some time ago, a fellow rod builder asked whether I could make him a 4-string binder like the one I currently use, and take with me to meets and demos. I said, sure, why not, so I started assembling and making parts, considering what upgrades I could incorporate – better motor mount, better balanced drive wheels, larger foot plate, smaller thread spools with no protruding wing nuts, thread tensioners that attach to the binder wheels in a less jury-rigged manner, and thread guides made from steel rod rather than sections of cheap fiberglass coarse fishing rods. Oh, and real flanges with grub screws to fix the rear upper drive wheel and the front binder wheel to the main axle, rather than epoxying them in place… So I set about doing all that, and am now nearing completion, only waiting for a new sewing machine motor and drive belt, and a set of sewing machine thread tensioners, to be delivered before I can finalize the build. Here are some intermediate build pics. Drive wheels provisiona...

At my age, threading a fly onto a tippet in low light conditions, without magnification, is an exercise in frustration. A few high end gadgets are on the market to help with that - magnetic fly threaders - but they are prohibitively expensive, and the concept behind them is simple enough that I reckoned I could make one myself. They are nothing more than a solid base with a groove, a tiny dimple in that groove at one end, to position the eye of the hook, and a small rare earth magnet embedded in the base, just below that dimple, to (sort of) keep the fly attached to the tool, and positioned so that the hole in the eye is aligned with the groove. Once attached, you use the groove to guide the end of your tippet towards, and hopefully right through the eye of the hook - if the eye is free of crowding materials or varnish, this should work relatively painlessly. Most available fly threaders are made either from aluminium or high density resin (some are even 3D-printed) but since I don’t h...

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.

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...

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...