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