Anybody have experience with this rod? It seems like a great idea, but I never hear anything about them.
I know Walton Powell created the concept and sold it to someone in Texas who has continued making the rods.
Hexagraph use to be a sponsor here…checking the sponsor page I didn’t see them listed so I guess thats over.
DG won one in the monthly drawing some years ago. Maybe he will respond with his opinion.
I’ve never cast one but have heard they are heavier than tubular rods of the same configuration…have never heard a bad word about them.
I owned one, a 4/5 and it was a great rod, no complaints at all, it is heavier than traditional graphite rods and I believe slightly stiffer. I don’t know exactly why I sold it, it is an interesting concept and from what I can tell a very durable design, it is not hollow, it is injected with foam of some sort inside it.
I think the problem is that they are hard to find and thus hard to test out before purchase.
Made from six strips of foam backed graphite. Action very similar to cane.
I know JC. I read the whole site and testimonials. I would just like one from someone I know and trust. Can you give me your opinion of the rod?
Hey Guys
I was just thinking. What if FAOL along with their sponsors started a Library of sorts for fly rods?
I read the site too. A very bold wager from the owner. I would like the chance to cast the rod and compare the rod to others in the same price range.
What do you guys think of a Library of Fly rods.
Thanks,
Sean
A library would be helpful.
I’ll be giving a review on the Hexagraph. I ordered a 7’9" 4-5 wt in the Curtis Creek model. I have 30 days to see if I like it. It was a rod that was special ordered with better cosmetics, and then canceled. It was used as a demo a small bit and Harry said it still looks new. If i want something different I can send it back and he’ll build me what I want. Hard to beat that.
I traded a rod this summer for a Hexagraph rod ~~ I had been wanting one for a long time and finally made the trade. I have a 9’ 5/6 wt rod. The only downside to the rod is that it is a two piece rod and can be a little large for travel. I fished the rod on the Kootenai River below the dam with a DT 5 and the rod really came through. Good distance, nice feel, able to handle two flies and the breeze with no problem. One other note ~~ the rod has the nickle silver ferrules like a bamboo rod so they can be tough to get apart at times. I really like the rod, I’m glad I have it, and now I just need to use it more. I was thinking about casting the rod tonight with a WF 4 just to see how it feels.
Best Fishes,
Rev Rob
The way I understand it. You can go up and down one line and it still loads like it should. I guess that’s because the rod has no built in load point like tubular graphite.
I have a Hexagraph 8’6" 4/5 that I won in the monthly drawing here. I fished it for a couple years, then had a ferrule stick and pulled it apart while taking the rod down, and haven’t got around to having it fixed. Someone remind me again, will you?
The rod is heavier than a round rod of the same length and weight, and slower. It casts just fine, and fights fish very well. I wish I had specified a smaller grip on it, though.
Would I pay retail for one? Nope. Will I fish mine when I get it fixed? Yep.
Dennis
Dennis,
Do you have any bamboo, or fished them? I would rather compare it to bamboo than tubular graphite. I believe that was the intention of the design by Powell.
Gramps,
Just curious. If you are looking to have a rod that has the feel and action of bamboo, why not just add another cane to your quiver?
Six of Cane, Six of Graphite
… by Gordon M. Wickstrom November 19, 1994
The Fly Tackle Dealers’ Show was in full swing as I walked happily down the aisles wearing my press pass. It felt wonderful to see on all sides the glamorous utensils of fly fishing. It’s surely a golden age of fly tying, rod design and building, angling art, every accoutrement of the sport! And what’s more, it’s a golden age in which the United States reigns supreme!
I was minding my own business, having a grand time, when out of the corner of my eye I spotted an array of cane rods. They stopped me dead in my tracks. Instantly I wondered how these would stack up against my own life-long treasury of fine bamboo fly rods. But something was not quite right. They looked like cane rods–or did they? Yes, but with a difference. At about the same instant, a couple of guys in the booth showing the rods moved in on me, smiling the happy smile of those who had once again put something over on an innocent. (It turned out that they were part of a clutch of Texas oilmen who had taken up the gospel and sales of these revolutionary rods.)
“No, they aren’t cane.” was their opening gambit. “But here, try one; see what you think.” I reached for the proffered rod, made it move, and felt seriously disoriented. If this was not a cane rod, what the hell then was it! To my hand, which knows cane rods intimately, this strange new stick was a puzzle. “It’s graphite,” I was told, “a new technology that replicates the structure of a bamboo rod in man-made materials and at a third or fourth of the price.” I got a quick lesson in how this thing, called HEXAGRAPH, was made, how a 1/32 inch layer of graphite material is bonded to a sheet of hard, closed-cell foam and then, from this sheet, six splines are milled and subsequently glued up into a section of rod, precisely as are splines of bamboo, only now without the natural variations, or occasional flaws of cane. Now there are none of the weakening nodes present every few inches in bamboo that must be staggered up the rod section according to a particular scheme. There are no weaknesses anywhere in the material. Every rod of its size, for all intents and purposes, is exactly alike.
These owners of the new Texas company introduced me to the venerable Walton Powell himself, who is responsible for the advent of the Hexagraph in the United States. He took me out on the loading dock where I cast two of the rods and was made a believer on the spot. There was lots of power, great delicacy, a living response in the hand, just like the finest cane rods, only lighter in actual weight. Here it seemed was the best of all possible worlds: the incomparable performance and pleasure afforded by bamboo and the radical efficiency of modern technology.
Still, in an interesting way, all’s not as modern and new as it might at first appear. I was fascinated with the way a milled strip of the new synthetic material replicates a milled strip of cane. In both materials, the working, power stuff (closely packed cane fibers of graphite) is at the surface and is supported underneath by pithier bamboo or the inert foam of the Hexagraph. In both materials, the inner core gives remarkable stability to the rod, absorbs shock and prevents breakage, and resists deformation (an inherent problem with round or tubular rods is that they must necessarily deform into an oval when flexed and therefore seek to move only in a single plane.) And so, strange to tell, bamboo, “the heavenly grass,” has implanted its miraculous gestalt in our synthetics. The claim of Hexagraph is that it will answer the problems of conventional tubular graphite rods: the tendency to breakage, the need to use a fast, stout sock-'em casting stroke, the difficulty of handling fish on fine tippets, the physical problem inherent in self-ferruling; (The Hexagraph boasts fine nickel-silver ferrules built on the principle of the famous Super Z.) and, the harsh look of conventional graphite. It was the Hexagraph’s innovative cane-like finish that, along with its classical slower and more open casting stroke, earned these rods their place in the filming of A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT (1993). This unique finish doesn’t seek to imitate bamboo exactly, but to suggest it, to recall it, and is especially handsome in its own right.
Anyhow, I had to find out what these new rods were like on the stream; the sales arena can do strange things to one’s judgment. Maybe the Hexagraph wouldn’t be as appealing out there casting to real fish in complex waters…but, it was. On the stream, I quickly found that the nine footer in my hand didn’t seem to care whether it cast my six-weight line twenty-five feet or fifty. Without a false cast, the difference of twenty-five feet was accomplished with startling ease, almost as though the rod were thinking on its own about what it had to accomplish. I felt like the rod’s companion, not its master. We were working together–and all that lightness in the hand to boot! The designers of the rods tell me that this is in good part because of their full flexing construction made possible and just right by their straight, continuous tapers: nothing compound or “progressive” here.
I found that I could, even with the nine footer, spot casts accurately at extremely close ranges, popping the fly now here and now over there, as though the rod and I were in some sort of complicity. The rod was becoming a part of my angler’s analysis of the stream, part, even, of my consciousness, like a living thing growing out of me. This may be because the rod has no spine, no one line of greater resistance to flexing, in fact no favored way of bending. Hence, there’s improved casting accuracy.
I’m reluctant to say this, but the Hexagraph was as fine in the hand as any of my coveted cane flyrods that I had thought to use in complete satisfaction to the end. And now, here come these Texas guys with their Hexagraphs to make me, at my advanced age, lust for a new rod for the first time in thirty years – which only goes to show how frail and likely to tumble we are when faced with the charm of new and exciting tackle! I tell myself that if these Hexagraphs are more satisfying than my canes, and maybe they are…it’s because they are appreciably lighter in weight than bamboo and so, ounce for ounce, feel more delicate. In performance, I think they’re about equal.
Of course, one must handle them like bamboo and not like tubular graphite. One has to slow down the cast, resist using that short, sharp shock of a forward cast needed to make the tube rods perform. The angler must wait for the Hexagraph to load under the burden of the line and generate its own inner energy for the forward, power stroke. One feels that the rod is doing the work, that it’s not all coming from the angler’s shoulder. Timing is more relaxed, a wider range of casting styles work equally well. Some say that, like bamboo, Hexes are “forgiving.”
Often, out on the stream, I stop awhile to watch my wife cast. I love to watch her favorite five-strip rod bending under the weight of the line. I love to watch the line curving and reaching out into the air ahead of her. It’s a sight that seems to belong intimately to the total life of the river. What she’s doing seems in harmony with the world around her. She looks like she belongs there. When recently she switched to my Hexagraph, the effect was the same - the six sided graphite gently, but powerfully accommodating itself to her sense of the trout’s world and the possibility of getting him to rise–just like the bamboo.
The rod, in an adagio of movement, now extends, now absorbs, now restrains, now pushes forward, to left and right, now hangs a cast in the air above a line in order that the leader and fly may drop just right for a drag-free float over the most demanding trout. The next cast may go like a shot to a rise some sixty feet upstream, even against the wind, the rod now aggressive enough to do the job.
It’s something like a dance, like all the rest of the expressive movement in the world of the stream. The rod bends as the limbs of the trees, reeds and grasses move with the wind, in like rhythms and, as we say about fly rods, in “action.” Everything’s graceful, easy, obliging, harmonious. No effort is wasted, nothing uselessly stressed, nothing alien. All’s a part of everything else. And the beautiful curving movement of that line in the air! The loop reaching, and still reaching out there before turning over and falling gently to its work. I never cease to wonder at it!
Of course, I might be talking about the performance of one of my bamboo rods. I could say the same of them really. But the remarkable thing is that now it’s a Hexagraph, a six-sided graphite rod at work, accomplishing this. It’s the complete rod for the complete angler, at a price that might make only a down-payment on the cane rod of one’s dreams.
Here in the Hexagraph is the vivid memory, experience, and style of bamboo, acting out bamboo’s virtues, providing its pleasures, doing its work in a classical way–all the while promising the dependability of rigorously controlled synthetic materials leading to long life and high performance.
For me, the only worry is in breaking faith (because they are like living things) with my old cane rods. Here I go, chasing after a glamorous, new wonder-product that seems to do all things better. I salve my guilt with the thought that maybe it’s a way of departing this disaster of a twentieth century that nevertheless is leaving us this legacy of superb cane flyrods. In exchange, we’re getting yet another bunch of great rods that will surely be a bench-mark in the next century looming ahead of us. We may as well start here and now.
I guess the reason i’m interested is it’s compared to the finest bamboo. I can’t afford the finest bamboo.
Well, they don’t have any ‘spine’ either. This is important to some folks I guess.
You run around the subject without an answer. Even in your testimony on the Hexagraph site. What do you think of the rod?
Gramps, sorry. I said they are a lot like cane and don’t have any spine. I have not fished any so I can’t help there. They are pretty and cost about like some cane. Do I have one? No. Do I want one? No, I don’t use all the rods I have now. Do you have a specific question about them? Hard to just give a blanket opinion. If you like a medium cane rod with no spine that costs as much as a bamboo rod but is not a bamboo rod you will probably like them. Are they worth $5,000.00? No. Are they worth $500.00? Yes, and even more. How much is up to you…
Gramps, sorry, I do not fish cane enough to give you an informed opinion. Then again, no two cane rods I have cast felt the same…
Things I have experienced with them, re: the cane similarity. People used to give me more space on the river when I had that rod. People used to give me grief at the abuse I put my “cane” rod to, landing big fish, using it on steelhead, and so forth.
I would suspect a cane rod of that length and weight would weigh a bit more than the hex, and I for one would worry more about breaking the cane than I ever did the Hex, or any other graphite rod. I keep getting told they don’t need to be babied, but…
Ok, thanks. I thought you had cast one.
I know I can buy a bamboo for the same price. What swayed me was it doesn’t take a set like bamboo, and I would guess it’s stronger. I tend to be a bit clumsy at times. I have no special love for grass. I’ll accept synthetic if it looks good, casts good, and is strong. I think the Hexagraph meets those requirements. Time will tell.
I agree with you about the strength of cane. I see a lot of them with short tips. A lot. I feel much better about the strength of the Hexagraph. I was paranoid about my bamboos and couldn’t really enjoy them.