Life in the bamboo shop

[RLNunley]

Well, taking a much needed break, here. Today, I've glued up 4 complete rods and cleaned up all of the sticky mess from that. After a wonderful late breakfast (I usually don't eat until this time of day, so no matter what time it is, it's breakfast, right???), I'm about to head back to the shop, brew a fresh pot of coffee and start making ferrules. I'll probably do that until about 7, eat again, then back to the lathe and reel seat time.

I'm not complaining! Not at all! I LOVE this life. Being in that shop, working on rods, smelling the glues, varnishes, bamboo, cutting oil, etc., is like a lifelong dream come true for me. I've been living that dream for quite a few years now, with one short break to run a business for an ex girlfriend (well, she wasn't EX at the time, but...). I made my first flyrod 19 years ago this spring and have loved it since the first one.

In that 19 years, I've gone from planing forms and a buying all of my hardware to a Leonard type beveller and making everything except the snake guides (I even make my own agate stripping guides when someone wants one). I've gone from copying other makers tapers to having a complete set of unique tapers of my own design (knew that Mechanical Engineering Degree would come in good for something).

I wouldn't trade my life now for anything. It's great. I make rods full time, I'm getting married to a woman that I was with 30 years ago and never really got over, and I'm moving to Mountain Home, AR, just about 5 miles from the banks of the White River and 12 miles from the Norfork River (both former homes of World Record Brown Trout). If I get bored with those, the Little Red River (present home of the WR Brown) is less than an hour away. Crooked Creek, some of the best Smallmouth fishing in the US, is less than 45 minutes away, and the place is riddled with small streams and lakes that might have anything in them. Life is grand.

Well, enough of this! I am just in a rare talkative mood and there's nobody here to talk to, so the BB hawkers just have to take the brunt of my yearning to ramble on about things.

Later,
Bob

[Kaboom1]

Bob
Ramble on my good man, ramble on.
Brad

[Eric-WD]

I'm sitting here thinking of a change in jobs, yours sounds wonderful

Eric

[Ron Eagle Elk]

Bob,

Sounds like a good life is getting even better.

REE

[fishbum]

Bob:
Uour schedule sounds similar to mine.

Get up
Eat breakfast
Walk a mile around the neighborhood
Go to the shop
Come in for lunch
take a nap
Go to the shop
Come in for an afternoon break
Go to the shop
Come in for dinner

Sent off my state sales tax and federal excise tax today.

Think I am going to play hooky and go fishing tomarrow. Tly tieing and rod making will just have to wait a day or two.

Life is good.

fishbum

[RLNunley]

Fishbum, Yep, pretty much my schedule, except for the walks. Those used to be part of the routine, but as of this past Friday, I'm 12 weeks out of a Unicondular Knee Replacement (bad bone out, good titanium in), so standing in front of the bench, lathe and binder for 10 or 12 hours a day is just about all the excercise my knee wants. By night time, I'm ready to sit in a chair and whine for awhile... then I just get up the next morning and do it all again, and call it fun!

Actually, I'm pushing it a little right now, because I have a fly shop that has four rods ordered and two of them, after I sanded the glue off, just weren't up to snuff, so I had to start from scratch again on those two. Part of the game.

FB, thanks for mentioning the FET and taxes... made my day brighter... NOT!!!! Well, at least the FET isn't as bad as it was a few years back. Still, money out of a rodmakers pocket, but someone has to pay for those fishing trips and turkey hunts for the politicians! LOL

Guys, you're right, life is getting better.

Later,
Bob

[herefishy]

Great life - but I don't understand about the rods that weren't up to snuff - I'm getting interested in bamboo, and can't picture how you could do all the pre-gluing steps on a rod and not realize something was wrong. Did the sanding go too deep? Or was it something unforeseen. I would hate to go to all that trouble and have something that wasn't usable. I know how a planing form works, but what does a beveller do?

[RLNunley]

1:51 and I'm done for the day! LOL Yesterday, that is...

herefishy, There are a lot of things that can go wrong.

One of these rods, everything fitted up just fine dry, then I glued it up. It looked fine in the string, so I removed the string and glue from the rod and had a terrible glue line. Not usual, but it does happen. The other one, after I get them sanded, I put "dummy" ferrule on the rods and test cast them. This rod was the perfect dimensions for a 7'3" 3 wt. It cast a 2 wt line great, but a 3 overloaded it and made it... well, it cast like $#!% with the line it was made for. Sometimes, no matter what you do, something like this can happen. This is VERY unusual. No problem... I needed a good 2 wt anyways, so I'll keep it.

Actually, two rods going bad is not bad. I have 11 rods at the same stage right now. I spent most of the night working on hardware for those. 2 out of 11 is a little bit higher "screwup rate" than I'm used to, but hey, Momma said there'd be days like this, and this was one of them!

OK, a Beveller uses two very small saw blades, like mini-table saw blades. They are set on stationary arbors at a 60? angle. The blades don't move up and down, rather a "bed" that the bamboo rides on is moved up and down by a pattern (each pattern is hand cut and there is a different set of pattern boards for every taper I make). As the bed moves up and down, a DC Motor pulls a carriage that pulls the bamboo through the blades. It will cut the SAME dimension every time... no variance, no problems.

Many are under the impression that a beveller is faster than handplaning by far. While it is a bit faster, it's not worlds faster and the preparation is the same for the strips, so a beveller doesn't really save that much time, but it does save a lot of physical labor and it gives you an absolutely consistent batch of strips.

Only downfalls to a beveller are... blades are expensive and must be replaced relatively often, and cost. If you had a machine shop build a beveller like mine, you could expect to put out anywhere from $15,000 to $20,000 for parts and labor... and then you can work on it for a few months tweaking it so it will work like you want it to. Been there! In your spare time, between tweaking, you can spend countless hours making your patterns for your tapers. Worth it in the long run, though, especially if you are doing this full time, like I am. If I were just making rods as a hobby, no way I would use anything but a planing form, but doing it as a full time business, the beveller is a must for me. I plan to add to the machines. As soon as I get to Mountain Home in June, I plan to start work on a miller, which does the same thing as a beveller, except it uses 60? mill cutters instead of saw blades.

Later,
Bob

[herefishy]

Thanks for the info, Bob, it was very informative. About the bad glue line - does that mean that the edges of the pieces of bamboo were not perfectly straight, so the glue squeezed out between them crooked? I can see what you mean that the beveller would save a lot of labor - that does look like work to plane the bamboo.

[rockymountain_brown]

Bob-great posts!!!
Thanks for the informative view.