Woodworker's Journal 2009-33-4, страница 16

I've been a woodworker and a fly fisherman for years, so it

was probably inevitable that sooner or later I would build a bamboo fly rod. Inevitable, perhaps, but not necessarily a walk in the park. It cost me a fishing season. I broke rods long before they left the shop. I made rods that worked better as tomato stakes. I fried one rod to a crisp. I suffered epoxy failures and polyurethane busts. In short, I enjoyed every minute of it and, three rods after I started, I have a rod that I'm not ashamed to show to the world.

A bamboo fly rod is made of six strips of bamboo glued together to form a hexagon. The strips are triangular in cross-section, and since the rod tapers from handle to tip, the triangular strips taper, too — the triangle is bigger at one end of the strip than the other.

All of this is done in three stages: First, you rough out a rod blank, splitting the bamboo stem to stern, kiln-drying it, and then planing it into long triangular strips — a set of six strips for each section of the rod. In the second stage, you taper the triangular strips with a block plane and a special metal form. Then you apply glue to the pieces and clamp them together by wrapping them tightly with thread. On a good day, it's a piece of cake. On a bad day, it's worse than getting skunked on the stream. Far worse. The final stage is applying the finish and attaching the hardware. I like to think of the stages as lumberjack, cabinetmaker and finisher.

Stage One: Lumberjack

This stage begins with a piece of Tonkin cane, the only cane used in rod making, because its long, dense, fibers make for a powerful rod. In the entire world. Tonkin cane grows in a single 30-square-mile patch of China.

Technically, bamboo is a grass, and a stick is called a culm. The easiest and fastest way to get the strips you need is to split the culm the way Windsor chair makers rive a chair back from a log, and for the same reason. Splitting bamboo gives you a piece with long parallel strands of grain. Rodmakers often make their own splitters that they drive into the end of the culm. Mine arc chisels with edges that are ground to a rounded point. As the pieces get smaller, I hold the end of the chisel on the bench with one hand, and feed the bamboo into it with the other. The goal: six strips plus whatever else you can get from the bottom five feet of the culm. This will be the butt section. The tip comes from the upper five feet of the culm, and because rods traditionally have an extra tip, you'll want to split it into 12 pieces.

At this point, a couple of minor adjustments arc required. A stick of bamboo is divided into shorter sections by a scries of bumps, called

The author uses a heat gun to bend bamboo and get rid of its nodes (photo above). Running the bamboo strips through a planer in a special shop-made jig (photo below) progressively turns them into the triangles needed to construct the fly rod.

nodes. You need to get rid of them and deal with the bends that typically occur around them. Fortunately, bamboo bends when heated. Holding the node directly over a heat gun until the wood is almost too hot to handle makes the heated section bend like warm plastic. Once I've heated it, I can flatten the node completely (or almost so) by clamping it in the vise with the outside face against a jaw. I count to 10 as I clamp the edges between the jaws to straighten out the bends. If any of the nodal bumps remain, they're sanded out by hand with 240-grit paper and a hard rubber sanding block.

Before shaping each piece into a triangle, there are two more steps. The first is to get each piece down to a manageable width. Traditionally this is done with a hand plane — it may be a grass, but bamboo works like wood. Tradition has its place, but this isn't really the time for it. I rip the strips to width on the table saw (use lots of featherboards), and then I plane them into triangles on a jig in the planer. Tire planer jig is a simple oak auxiliary table with 60° grooves routed into

Using a shop-made "bamboo cane kiln," our author demonstrates one of the many steps required to create a bamboo fly rod.

Woodworker's Journal August 2009

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