Fruits of my labor..

Bamboo rod making, a hobby I picked up 2 years ago after I bought 3 bamboo fly rods through the internet. I was fascinated by their workmanship and how they transformed culms of bamboo into fly rod, the time and labor spent to make the rods.

As modern technology sets in, making these bamboo rod seems to be easier. There are mills that can produce tapered bamboo strips within minutes.One need to invest on the equipments if they want to produce their rod commercially. These rod making machines are indeed expensive.

However, there are still some bamboo rod makers who prefers to craft their rod using traditional methods, splitting the bamboo manually and planing the strip on the planing forms. This is more labor intensive.

My 1st bamboo rod took me almost 12 months to complete as I have to make the tool and equipments for rod making along the process. Adding to that, my slow learning curve of rod making and a lot of trial and errors.

The 2nd rod was a bit faster, it took 6 months to finish. I learned new things along the way. It was an integrated bamboo ferrules rod. Very interesting project. Never knew they did that... never even knew this can be done..

The 3rd one took about the same time, maybe slightly faster. It's a "node less" bamboo rod. Some of my friends call it "chopsticks" fly rod because the strips are made of multi piece of 8' ~ 9' bamboo jointed together. Great concept. But I do not know how long could the joints withstand the stress and the force during fishing even though I did scarfing between every guides on the rod.

It has been a fun journey minus the sweat and body ache. I would say the 3rd rod will not be the last rod I make.......