From The Workbench

Someone recently asked me if I thought I was better at building rods now than I was ten years ago. My answer? I sure hope so. It sounds glib, I know, but let me explain a little bit because I actually think that, all joking aside, there’s an important lesson hiding in there. One piece…

Earlier this spring I was talking to a friend on the phone at the shop and he was telling me about a hatch on unnamed river he’d recently been fishing. “They were just coming off in clouds,” he said, and from the sound of his voice I knew he meant it. It had that slightly unhinged…

I wanted to give a quick plug about the upcoming Catskill Fly Fishing Museum event — “Summer Fest” –which is taking place this weekend in Livingston Manor, NY. You can find more detailed information here, but it’s certainly a great cause for rivers, trout, and the fly-fishing tradition. Among other things there will be plenty…

I dislike the dog days of summer for a variety of reasons, only one of which is that by now the trout fishing has pretty solidly gone to pot. The end of spring usually doesn’t bring the best fishing but at least there’s some, which means you more or less have a standing excuse to…

Sorry about the radio silence this past week. I wanted to get this post up sooner but a few things managed to get in the way. Hopefully I’ll be putting them up with a  bit more regularity going forward. I hope everyone is doing well. When it comes to collecting, fishing, and otherwise enjoying bamboo…

This past week a good friend of mine and I visited the American Precision Museum in Vermont, a place that’s been recommended to me a few times over the years. The museum claims to be the largest collection of “historically significant machine tools” in the country, and since I have a real appreciation for classic…

There’s probably no phrase that a rodmaker likes to hear less than this one, even when it’s thoroughly justified. It usually means that we’re behind schedule (which I guarantee you we’re well aware of already and probably a little touchy about) and asking about it just serves as an unpleasant reminder. Maybe a lathe broke…

How long does it take to master bamboo rodbuilding?

I got an email the other day from someone who had purchased a rod of mine on the secondary market, a Hunt Pattern “M”, and he was curious about what the “M” stood for. It’s a question that crops up from time to time so I figured it might be a good idea to address…

Rodmakers like to talk about tapers in a way that probably seems obsessive to those who aren’t bamboo fanatics, but there’s no getting around how important they are. When you boil it down, a rod’s tapers are sort of like its genetic code (albeit carefully engineered code) which determines how it’s going to perform…

I got an email the other day from a customer who said he had a few questions about a rod that his friend had recently bought. He wanted to send along a few pictures to see if I could help identify it. Anyway, when I opened up the photos I was surprised to see that…

I was thinking a lot this week about the Catskills. A number of rodmakers gathered there this past weekend and I was supposed to be among them before I had to scuttle my plans at the last minute due to an embarrassing injury (some doofus–me–managed to drop a rather sizable piece of machinery on his…