I still had a large slab of highly figured cherry lying around that I acquired for making presentation quality hexagonal wooden rod tubes (I make standard wooden rod tubes from run-of-the-mill woods like tulipwood / yellow poplar). I already made two rod tubes from this slab of wood using a bandsaw to cut slats and running them through the thickness planer to smooth them and reduce thickness to final dimensions - about 4.5 mm. Unfortunately this results in patches of strong tearout at some of the more highly figured sections. So I came up with a new procedure to cut and prepare thin slats - basically directly to final thickness on the table saw, with using the thickness planer only for final smoothing/ removing table saw marks. However I wasn’t quite sure whether this would work with full length (2pc rod) slats, so I decided to cut off a piece of the cherry slab wide enough to cut 6 slats, and divided that into a length sufficient for a 3pc tube and a short length (about 50 cm), and use that short length to test the table saw procedure. The new process, BTW, also includes a new approach for creating the 60 degree bevels to the sides of the slats, bringing them to final width at the same time - this involves a 60 degree clamp jig and a hand plane, not unlike the approach for tapering bamboo strips.
The approaches worked pretty well, and after glueing up these slats into a hex tube, I hand on my hands a 50 cm rod tube (unfinished as we speak). So to make the best use of this tube, I decided to also make an experimental 5pc, 7ft fly rod, from a single internode of tonkin bamboo (nodes removed, split into 32 48cm long splices) - this will be a nodeless, spliceless travel rod with integrated tapered bamboo ferrules…
Tube ready and finished. Rod to follow...
Blank finished...
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