I haven’t posted much lately, life seems to have gotten in the way.
Now I find myself a bachelor by geography. I just started a new job and will have 9ish months of bore dome to cope with 5 days a week. The weekends are a 4 hr drive home and then packing and getting stuff in storage, then 4hrs back to work Monday morning.
I have been thinking of getting into a bamboo rod, but I haven’t found one I could afford.
So I’ve decided to build one, either from a vintage that needs help or a new blank. The only problem I have come across are that most of the new blanks I can afford are Imported, not saying that’s good or bad, I’m just not certain. I would almost rather have a vintage, cheap and fix it up, but I hate dealing with ebay for something like this…
I guess I’m just looking for opinions at the moment…
You might want to look into making a Banty. Find a three piece 9 foot rod and make a new 6 to 7 foot rod from the middle and tip sections. You can use the ferrule from the butt section and part of the butt section to build a new handle.
I’ve made a couple of these and they make a nice rod. I’ve found they usually cast well with a 5 or 6 weight line.
You might want to check out clarkclassicrodforum as those guys live and breathe boo rods.
If you go on the big auction site you will find a great many bamboo fly rods listed. Some will be junk and others will be O.K. If you concentrate on Montague, Horrocks-Ibbotson, or South Bend you should be able to pick up a 9 foot rod for not too much money that you can rework into a 6 foot banty rod. Just make sure that the mid section and the tips are full length.
Tampa, The stowaway blanks at Cabela’s would work fine, but I really want to try my hand at a 'boo rod.
A banty is a good idea, I hadn’t thought about that. I’ll start looking into that now. Thanks for the suggestions waltryan and dave
Betty, I’ve been thinking about a bamboo rod since I started fly fishing. I just couldn’t afford the cost of a new rod… now I have several ideas for cost effective Boo, and LOTS of free time, so I decided to take the plunge.
If you are handy with wood working you might consider building a PMQ (Poor Man’s Quad) style bamboo rod from scratch. This is a 4 sided rod made with just two strips. The only tools required are a good sharp hand plane and a dial caliper, no planning form is needed.
The finished rod might not be as straight and true as a traditonal hex rod, since it is harder to compensate for the nodes with just two strips instead of 6. But they cast nicely.
I built my first one over just 2 weekends! The cane strips were generously donated to me by a board member. One of the fun things about a PMQ rod is that you can modify the action by additional planning or scraping after the rod is glued together, just the ticket for the guy who likes to tinker. Since you don’t have much money invested in the project you can build several and see how the action changes as you modify the taper. Since I used strips that were already split and heat treated all I needed to do was straighten them and plane them to size.
Some folks use a simply wooden planning jig, but you can easily make these ‘freehand’ if you have a good flat surface to work on top of. I used a 4’ long piece of oak baseboard trim on top of my dinning table forthe first one. You just plane off a bit, then check the progress with the caliper until the desired dimensions are reached.