Without seeing and casting them side by side, I don’t think that you can judge the quality differences between ANY rod, and certainly WHERE it was built has no bearing on it…
The rods produced for retail sale in this country by Sage, Loomis, Winston, et. al., are as ‘mass produced’ as rods built in China, Japan, England, or anywhere else. No one single individual ‘builds’ a rod for Sage. Things are done in an assembly line fashion, to keep expenses down and productivity high.
No one has a machine that does all the work required of a fly rod without human hands being involved.
The blanks are built from resins and cloths of varying materials. To build a rod from these things requires the same minimum amount of hands on time regardless of where it’s built. It might be more or less expensive based on the materials, labor rates, and care taken in the finish process, but the basic ‘process’ is pretty much the same.
Grips, reel seats, and guides have to be hand fitted to the rod. A machine doesn’t do this, even in China. Thread is wrapped on to hold the guides, by hand (even with a motor turing the rod, it still takes a skilled hand to guide it on and most commerical rod wrappers don’t use motors anyway).
The guide wrap finish is applied by hand. EVEN in a factory turning out thousands of rods (like Sage), PEOPLE still have to do this.
So, while it’s a cliche, NO rod is ‘mass produced’ if your definition of that means it’s done by machines, and ALL rods built by the major manufacturers are ‘mass produced’ if you mean built by rote in large quantities without variations.
If the implication of the origianl post is that it can’t be the equal in quality (or price) of a Sage or Winston simply because it was built in China, then that’s just bigotry.
There is nothing to make me believe that the Chinese folks who assemble these rods aren’t just as skilled, or even more skilled, than their counterparts in THIS country. China has a long and respectable history of incredible skills at handcrafts of many types. No reason to think they won’t be good at something as easy as crafting a fly rod.
We all need to understand that China is a huge population of consumers that are going to make an impact on every industry. There are skills there, not everything they produce will retain the ‘cheap junk’ clasification. As they begin to flex their growing economic muscle, we’ll be seeing their products at many price levels.
Personally, I’m looking forward to it.
Good Luck!
Buddy
