I recently completed a rod build for my friend Ned. He has been fishing with us on-and-off  for the las year, and it was time for him to get his own rod. He picked himself out a nice 8.5 Foot Orvis Hydros blank, yellow whipping thread, a reverse half-wells grip and Struble up-locking reel seat with a zebra maple spacer. 

He got a chance to take it out for a spin this weekend at the Little Sur trout opener, which I hope to write more about later in the week. I don't love graphite rods, but I have to say that this hydros is a true mid-flex, and loads quite nicely. Ned was able to make the short delicate casts necessary to catch these little trout on a dry-fly.

Recently, I have been finishing my rods with thinned spar varnish, but for this more modern rod,  I thought I would use light build epoxy. Epoxy definitely saves a lot of time drying, especially on a four piece rod, but I think I get a cleaner, smoother result with varnish. One advantage of epoxy was that I was to make transparent ferrule wraps by mixing epoxy with acetone. This saved trying to find a thread color to match the blank. 

I have to say I really enjoyed making a rod for a friend. It let me branch out with style and materials, and gave me an excuse to keep building, even when I don't necessarily need another rod for myself.

--Posted by Eben

Well, I have been quite busy with work and non-fishing travel, so I have not had much time to fish or work on any of my projects. I was hoping to steal a day from this weekend, but the wall of rain falling outside my window has made that impossible. 

Fortunately the mailman has been very good to me this week, and I have now received the last components I need to build the Orvis Hydros rod for my friend Ned. 

I took the blank up to the Bay area this weekend so that Ned could see it, and pick out a reel-seat insert, grip style and thread colors. He picked our a very nice Zebra insert, a reversed half wells grip and yellow/silver wraps. I have yet to set up a good cork lathe, so the grip is pre-formed by Struble, with a nice inlet to match the Struble reel-seat hardware. 

If the rain keeps up, I might get quite a bit of the work done on this rod over the weekend. At the least, I would like to epoxy the handle section, lay out the guides and wrap the ferrules. 

As always, I'll post updates here as I go.

--Posted by Eben

While this past weekend did not afford an opportunity to fish, there were a few free hours to devote to some of my lingering projects. So, I began to work on my bamboo rod rebuild in earnest. This is my first attempt at doing anything with bamboo, but it seems that the basic steps are the same as they would be for rebuilding any rod. 

Step 1: Documentation

Before doing anything to the rod, I took photographs of each piece and recorded all of the pertinent measurements, including number of guides, guide spacing, wrap color and style, and handle configuration.

The most notable thing about this particular rod, is that it was originally intended to be usable as either a fly or spinning rod. In the fly rod configuration, it is an 8 foot three piece rod with two tips. However, there is a third tip that fits into the but section to make a shorter spinning rod. In the spinning configuration, the handle and reel seat can be completely detached and reversed to accommodate a spinning reel.

Step 2: Research

There are few extant markings on the cane, but I suspected that it might be a Montague or other production rod. But, after consulting with some knowledgeable folks, I determined that, due to it's hardware, it was probably a post-WWII Japanese rod. Not collectable, but highly fishable.

Step 3: Disassembly
Using care not to mar the cane, I used a single-edged razor blade to remove the guides and as much of the thread wraps as possible. The wraps on the guides and ferrules came off without much trouble, but the long intermediate wraps were worn in many places, and proved much more difficult. Ultimately, I left about half of them on, hoping that they would be removed in the next step.

As the reel seat and grip are in good condition, and as they can be removed completely as a unit, I simply set them aside for the time being.

I would have opted to keep the original ferrules on the rod, but they seem to be made of a soft chrome-plated metal and at least one of them was badly bent, which at first led me to believe (mistakenly) that the cane had taken on a significant "set". I removed the ferrules by heating them slowly over a candle, taking care not to scorch the cane. After several minutes and a few tugs with pliers, they each came free without marring the cane.

Step 4: Stripping

After some research, I found that the "natural" citrus based Citristrip that I use on fiberglass rods could be used to strip the varnish off of cane without damaging the glue that binds each individual strip of bamboo together into a tapered blank. Over the course of a day I submitted to cane to four treatments, which succeeded in removing all of the remaining thread, but only about half of the varnish.

I am going to experiment with some light sanding and maybe more lengthy treatments to try to get as much varnish off as possible without harming the blank. Once I have a completely clean blank, it will be time to start building the blank back up to a fishable rod.

--Posted by Eben

I was a very good boy this year, so for Christmas Santa brought me a pretty little honey colored blank to make a new 6'6" fiberglass 3wt. I was a bit unsure as to whether or not I needed another 3wt, as I already have a lovely Orvis Superfine Trout Bum 7'6" graphite 3wt.  Although I love my Superfine, it is a bit stiff and a bit long for my new favorite river, the Little Sur. The Little Sur was burned rather badly in the 2008 wildfires, but the trout population has rebounded and it is now full of eager little wild coastal rainbows, averaging in size from 3-6 inches. 

These little guys get almost no fishing pressure and will rise readily to an attractor dry fly. My superfine can place a humpy as delicately as any rod, but risks catapulting these litte fish into the brush when you set the hook. My hope is that the "softness" of the fiberglass will make it more fun to catch small fish, and protect them from becoming unintentional aeronauts.  

In order to keep the rod as light as possible I chose to use a cork reel seat, and because I am cheap, I didn't want to invest in any of the lovely reel seat hardware on the market. Based on this post on the Fiberglass Flyrodders message board, I decided to try to use stone rings as bands to hold the reel seat. 

I wanted the wraps to really "pop" agains the honey colored blank, so I decided to use scarlet colored silk thread. The this was the first time I had ever wrapped with silk, and I must admit that it was a challenge. The silk was considerably thiner than the nylon I have used on my previous rods, and it had a nasty tendency to pick up the oils on my hands. On the other hand, because the wraps were so much narrower, they blended together much better under varnish than the nylon. I used helmsman spar varnish, as on my previous rods, but I thinned it to only 40% concentration. I think this is finally the concentration I have been looking for. After four coats it had a nice low-build epoxy look. The guides and tip tops are all English bronze light wire, which also give a nice contrast. The butt cap and winding check are nickel-silver, from Golden Witch, and I think they finish the rod off nicely.

I wont get to take this out to the Little Sur until it opens at the end of may, but it is nice enough here in Santa Cruz that I took it lawn casting (something that always draws an audience of neighbors and embarrasses the heck out of me). The action was slow and sweet, bending down almost all the way to the butt, and it was able to throw tight loops with only the leader and six or seven inches of line. In any event, I am very pleased with it.

--Posted by Eben