YOLO! - FlyBillz' First Bamboo Build

Finishing up the sanding of the blank and will then meet back up with Mike to apply the finish to the blank. Picked up some 400 and 600 grit sandpaper to work with. Applying the finish will take some time, many coats..

No recent pictures, but will take some more when you can see a change in the blank.
 
Finishing up the sanding of the blank and will then meet back up with Mike to apply the finish to the blank. Picked up some 400 and 600 grit sandpaper to work with. Applying the finish will take some time, many coats..

No recent pictures, but will take some more when you can see a change in the blank.
Really glad to hear you are back at it.
 
From today! Getting it done! Met with Mike for about an hour. I'll sand while hes on a trip and then work on the varnishing stage!

The rod i took pictures of is basically the rod I'm building. Martha Marie taper, 7' 6". Its nodeless construction though! Mike can explain more when he has time!
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it was nice to see Bill again, it's been a while. We spent some time showing how I wanted him to sand out the shafts he had glued up. During our lay off I decided to try my hand at making a nodeless bamboo fly rod. There is a benifit of not dealing with the nodes during the final stages before a glue up. I was being guided by my good friend Tom Bowden. He was quite a bit of help coaching me through the process. Another part of my adventure is staying away from power tools and machines that generate dust. So this rod is all manual labor and minimal noise. The process starts out by cutting all the nodes out of a culm of bamboo. After that you end up with tubes of bamboo without the nodes or dams. You can do your heat treating in the kitchen oven "cooking" the tubes for 18 minutes at 350 degrees. Now that they are heat treated you can split these short tubes into the sticks that will become the long strips that will become the 6 triangular parts of the shafts.

This process will make it possible for a person to make a bamboo fly rod with minimal tooling and not a lot of room at their home to devote to the hobby.

If there is any interest, I'll add more steps that follow in the process. I'll add a few images to this.

Oh, and rod number one that bill pictured was not my best work cosmetically, now that I have been through the entire process this rod will be MUCH nicer.

heat treating.jpgheat treating 2.jpgnodeless 2.jpgnodeless 3.jpgglue joint.jpgmulti splice glue up.jpg
 
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