What Makes a Good Bamboo Rod?
(Excert from Chaper 4: Rod Design)
The Lovely Reed
By Jack Howell
Our sincere thanks to Pruett Publishing Company
July 20th, 1998
"Rod building is a lot like homebrewing:
Maybe nobody has made a raspberry-honey-spruce-espresso porter
before (someone probably has), but that's not to say it wouldn't be
good. The endless possibilities are intoxicating, and whether you
get the urge to build a 4-foot 1-weight or a 10-foot, one piece,
hollow-built nodeless salmon rod, there's nothing stopping you.
A little madness is probably therapeutic, and some rod builders seem
to be engaged in an unspoken competition to see who can build the
wierdest rod.
As any angler knows, there are many different
kinds of rods, because different kinds of fishing require rods with specific
qualities and dimensions, and because people like different things. Not
only is a good rod for 10-inch high-country brookies different from a
good rod for Umpqua steelhead, but one steelhead fisherman's ideal rod
may be quite different from his partner's. An important part of a rod
maker's education is his development of a keen sense of rod action
and utility, his ability to judge rods and to translate that judgement
into rod action.
This mean, among other things, learning to cast well
if you do not already do so. I approach this subject with some caution,
because I have plenty of work to do myself in this regard. Still, the better
caster you are, the better you will be at determining the limits, capabilities, and
shortcomings of a particular rod, and the better your rods will be. It's certainly
not necessary to be a champion caster to build great rods, but then again, it
doesn't hurt, and what I'm talking about is a continuum - every little bit helps.
Having great casters (or other great caters, if you are one) try your
rods and offer opinions is one measure that you should probably consider
no matter how good you are, but it's not a very satisfying substitute in the
end for using your own muscles and trusting your own senses. The pure
sensation of throwing a beautiful line with a bamboo rod is something
that you deserve to experience, especially if you made the rod. I don't
consider myself to be a particularly good caster, but one of my ambitions
is to become as good as my late start and limited aptitude will allow, so I
try to spend at least a little time practicing every day. There are lots of
books and videos available on casting, as well as some fine instructors but,
once your mechanics are decent, it all boils down to the same thing:
Practice.
Just as there are various qualities, often expressed in
terms of absolutes, that one might hope to find in a friend, there are absolute
qualities that any good rod is said to posess, though the mixture of qualities that
any one person finds satisfying may seem inexplicable. It is well that this is so.
Otherwise, there would be one good rod design in the world and the overwhelming
majority of us would be friendless. If you ask any angler whether his favorite
rod has enough power for the fishing he does, he will say yes. If not, the rod
would not be his favorite. Does the rod have a pleasant action? Does it throw
a smooth line? Can he achieve adequate accuracy with it, and mend line
effectively? Does it roll cast well?
Absolutes, though, are useful only to a point. Affirmative
answers to the above questions tell you little about the rod, other than that the
angler likes it, no matter what you think. Here's my own ideal: a rod that is
powerful and crisp without sacrificing delicacy, accuracy, smoothness, or the
ability to make short, soft presentations. Who could argue with that? The
problem is that those are just words. My ideal fly rod, should I ever achieve
it, might be too slow for one judge, or too fast for another. This is why an
appreciation for and the ability to cast a variety of rod actions is valuable if you
really want to learn, or if you wish to build custom rods for other.
There have been a few attempts here and there to
quantify rod action, to assign a numerical rating of fast or slow based upon
stress curves, rate-of-change graphs, static deflection tests, oscillation
frequencies, and so forth. I certainly would not discourage anyone from
pursuing such standards. Anyone who improves them significantly or who
discovers new and useful ones, will do the rod-building world a service.
What a fly rod should be seems to be an even more
inexhaustible subject than how to make it, which is a large part of why this
stuff is so much fun. Althis sections includes quite a few tapers, it seems in
order to discuss rod design in general, because sooner or later you'll want to
try your hand at it. There aren't any charts and graphs in this section because
I'm not an engineer. If your're really interested in numbers I'll try to point you
in the right direction, but my approach has always been to try to build great
rods by hook or by crook, and if my limited work with numbers has taught me
anything about rod design it's that numbers don't tell the whole story." ~ JH
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