An ultralight spinning rod

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 Walker in his ‘Rod Building for Amateurs’ in 1952), and abandoning the staggered ferrule layout. This has resulted in the Backspin model (being a rod with slightly less tip action that my ‘Topspin’ model), a 5’6” true 3 g spinning rod. The colour scheme of the wrappings (green with detached red trim bands) is a homage to the Pezon&Michel Telebolics from their golden era (check out some of their catalogs on splitcaneinfo.com).