"Building Your Own Bamboo Rod, Part Two"
By D. W. Hildebrand
October 10, 2003 | Bamboo Fly Fishing

By now the cuts should all have band aids and the splinters should have been pulled.

It’s time for the next step in our journey.

When we concluded the first part we had our strips split, filed or sanded, and straightened. Remember in the future that these are key steps that should be done regardless of how many rods you have made.

Now it is time to start the main process of turning the strips into usable beveled strips to put together into our fly rod.

First, you will need a plane. A block plane is one of the most frequently used models. In the first article, I realize I wasn’t too clear about what is optimal for this work. I prefer a Model 9 ½ block plane, standard angle. I have used the low angle planes before and while they will work, I have personally had quite a few problems with node lifting or gouging with the low angle planes. It is completely your call as to what plane to use and if you already own a low angle plane, by all means go ahead and try it. It may work perfectly well for you. You may also use a small bench plane as I have heard some makers do and have had great success with them. It needs to be a plane you can propel without having to force it or “muscle” it through the cane and the blade must be extremely sharp. It is for this reason I recommend either the Hock Blades or the A2 cryo blades. Both of these types of steel seem to hold an edge well and resharpen easily.
We are now into sharpening. When using the types of blades used by these tools either a diamond whetstone or waterstone in various grits is a very good idea. I personally sharpen on 4 different stones. I use a Veritas Honing Guide to set the angle to sharpen on the stone. I then use a fine grit diamond stone, followed by a super fine diamond stone, followed by a 4000 grit waterstone and finish with a 8000 grit polishing waterstone. I would be willing to bet you will initially think all those stones amount to overkill. You will just have to trust me on this, but a very sharp plane blade is essential. Another option for sharpening plane blades is the Scary Sharp System which you can probably find on various sites throughout the net.

Once you have planed some cane and have experienced a dull blade, the difference between “just OK” sharp and very sharp is readily apparent.

In the previous article we mentioned an oven. I will deal with a fairly easy way to build one if you would like to build a heat gun powered oven. The reason I now mention the oven is that after we rough bevel the cane, it will be time to heat treat this bamboo. While on this subject, as I mentioned previously, you may in this instance go without the oven if you choose due to the flaming we did on the bamboo.

Also at this point we will need some type of planning forms. There are some great plans on building your own available from a few sites on the web. Todd Talsma’s excellent site, www.bamboorodmaking.com has a tips site which will give you directions for this. I will caution you it can be a long and tedious process to build your own. Some common materials are steel or a hardwood. There are also a number of folks that sell both inexpensive wood and metal forms. Here are some of the ones I know of:

www.goldenwitch.com- they have both hardwood starter forms and metal forms, wood roughing forms, and supplies

www.wagnerrods.com – Jeff Wagner’s site, metal forms, wood roughing forms and various supplies

http://www.coloradobootstrap.com – Colorado Bootstrap, metal forms

http://members.tripod.com/~BamBooFlyRods/flyrods.html - Lon Blauvelt, forms and supplies

http://pages.prodigy.net/pumpkin10 -Rush River Rods, Tony Larson sometimes has final forms for sale

That should give you plenty of opportunities for pricing and deciding to build or buy your forms. It is entirely up to you which you decide upon.

In an ideal situation you would have both final planning forms and roughing forms. The roughing forms are to start the initial angle on the bamboo you will need to hit to make the strips work in a final form. Roughing forms are generally made from wood as the plane really shouldn’t need to come into contact with them, thus there should be no gouging or planning of these forms. Roughing forms are fairly inexpensive and very handy when first starting out.

If you do not feel able to purchase both roughing and final forms, then we can make the final forms do the full job if we have to. Once again, this is entirely your decision.

Now we will start on the oven details and how to make one that will work for your first few rods.
Go to a hardware store, chain, or any other that sells galvanized stove pipe. This pipe generally comes in 6’ sections.

You will need the following:
1- 6’ section of 6” stove pipe
1- 6’ section of 8’ stove pipe
1- solid end cap for the 8” stove pipe
1- solid end cap for the 6” stove pipe
1- 6” to 4” reducer
at least 2 bundles of pipe insulation
one roll of aluminum stove pipe tape
A pop rivet fun and rivets
Drill and one 1/8’ or slightly larger bit
One four ft section of ¼” hole or even ½” hole hardware cloth
2- digital thermometers (from Target, cooking stores, etc)

Take the 6” piece of stove pipe and put the 6” to 4” reducer on one end and rivet the reducer on. Then wrap the entire 6” piece of pipe with the insulation, leaving the ends uncovered. Now take the solid end for the 8” stove pipe and drill 8 to ten holes in the center of the stove pipe with the small bit about an inch or so apart. Make a circle out of the holes. Now mount the solid cap with the holes on one end of the 8” pipe and rivet it well. Slide the wrapped six inch piece of pipe with the reducer end down into the 8” pipe. Take the aluminum pipe tape and cover the gap between the eight inch and six inch pipe thoroughly. It is a good idea to make sure you overwrap the 6” and 8” pipe with the tape. Now take the solid cap for the 6” stove pipe you bought and find a diffuser or scraper attachment that cane with the heat gun. Cut a hole in the center of the 6” cap and mount the diffuser or scraper from the heat gun so that the nozzle of the heat gun is centered in the hole. Rivet the diffuser or scraper to the cap. Do not attach the cap to the pipe with rivets. It must be removable! Now cut the hardware cloth to make a rack the length of the internal 6” pipe. It is easier to overcut the hardware cloth and bend it under a bit to support the rack. Insert the rack into the pipe and you now have your oven. Now mount the thermometers 1/3 and 2/3 of the way down the outer pipe by drilling a hole through both pipe sections and inserting the thermometers. You are ready to go!

You will need to test the oven before using it. Hopefully you have an adjustable temperature heat gun that will allow you to vary the temperature output somewhat. Mount the heat gun and turn on the thermometers and start the heat gun. You will need to experiment to reach a fairly uniform heat with this setup, but it will work fine.

Now you will be ready to heat treat the cane. There are many differing schools of thought on how long and what temperatures are best, but a nice rule of thumb for rough beveled strips is to start at 15-18 minutes and 350 degrees. Heat varies in different ovens and cane varies also, so experiment a bit. To aid in our experimentation, we will rough bevel a few extra strips for testing our oven.

Now it is time to stagger the nodes and cut the strips. This is another area that is open to some discussion and disagreement. There are four basic ways to stagger the nodes for a fly rod. First is random. Just don’t put one beside another and go from there. Second is a 2 X 2 X 2, third is a 3 X 3, and fourth is the Garrison Method or 1,5,3, 6, ,2, 4 which is incidentally the firing order for many straight six cylinder engines. Which do I prefer? I use the 2 X 2 X 2 most frequently for my rods. That is what we will use on this one and you can determine what you prefer on future rods. Here is how to do it. Do not end you section in a node or start it with a node. This will either put them at the very end or at the tip of the rod and perhaps impart some small weakness in that area. I do not know whether or not this is 100% true, but have found it a good rule of thumb and many rodmakers swear by this, so that is good enough for me.
Lay six similar strips on a flat surface, bench or floor side by side. Find the node location on the strips. Being similar strips, once they are aligned, all the nodes should be in the same place. Leave the first and fourth strip where they are while moving the second and fifth strip forward about an inch. Leave all the strips where they now are. Now take the third and sixth strip and move them so their nodal area is about the same distance above the nodal area on the second and fifth strip that those strips are from the first and third strip. That’s it! Really! Now while holding the strips in place, put them together and tape them to hold them in their current placement. Now you have completed the staggering, it is time to cut the strips to the length you want to work with.

It is now time to determine what rod taper you would like. Some suggestions are in order here. I would suggest on the first rod you make either a 7’ or 7 ½’ four or five weight rod. Here are my reasons. First, when it comes time to do the tips, the bamboo will not be so fine that it will be difficult to bind or plane. Second, this is a very popular rod length and weight and there are numerous tapers available in these sizes. Third, it either gives us a 42” or 45” strip to work with and plane. You will appreciate that later.

There are a number of sites and places to obtain tapers for rodmaking. www.canrod.com has a taper archive as does hexrod, which is found at http://www.uwm.edu/~stetzer/Tapers/index.html .

I would suggest your first taper be one of the following which are all nice rods and good starter tapers. In the five weight, I would recommend either the Payne 101 which is a 7 ½ foot 5 weight, a Dickerson 7613 which is the same length and line weight, or a Garrison 209 of the same length and weight also. For a four weight rod the Payne 98 which is a 7’ 4 weight rod. Any of these rods will serve you well and you may be certain you will continue to fish it.

Since we are discussing tapers, perhaps a bit of a custom may be in order here. It is not a nice thing to make a taper derived from living makers’ rods without their permission or consent to do so. In rodmaking circles it is not well regarded to make a living makers’ rod taper for sale without their permission either, for obvious reasons. Quite a bit of time and money has been invested by the maker to arrive at that taper and it is not kosher to potentially sell their own taper against them.

When you have determined what rod you will make, it is time to cut the strips that you have staggered. Since we will initially make a 2 piece one tip rod, we will need twelve strips. The total is six matching for the butt section and six matching for the tip section. It is advisable to have at least one extra strip of each node placement at this point. We will also use these strips as oven demos later. When making the cuts, it is necessary to determine whether we are making a seven foot or seven and one-half foot rod. Always add a couple inches to each end of the strip to give yourself some room for error. For the seven foot rod you will need 42” strips plus two inches for a total of 44”. For the seven and one-half foot rod you will need 45” strips plus two inches which makes our needed strips 47” minimum. At this point more length within reason is always better. If you are more comfortable with 3 or 4 inches extra, by all means, leave it on and cut the strips at that length.

If you have the rough beveling form, place a strip in the form. Never plane the enamel side of the cane! This is where the fibers that give cane its flexibility and power lie. If you plane that, you will remove them and have a rod that either breaks or isn’t much use. Place the strip enamel side against the steeper angle in the roughing form. Hold it in place firmly. There are a couple ways to do this. You may hold it by hand or use some form of clamp to hold it there. There are some neat little clamps sold by Home Depot and Lowe’s and such that are metal with rubber tipped ends that retail for around $.99. Do not use a clamp that is so tight that it marks the strip in any way. Set your plane to take a shallow cut, about 2 to 3 thousandths at this point. If you do not have a caliper or micrometer, this is very thin. Roughly the thickness of a heavy sheet of paper or two. This should let you take off some high points on the strip. Don’t worry if you only take partial shavings at this point. Until you get the strip down to a fairly flat surface, there will be areas that the blade will not hit right now. It is common and nothing to worry about yet. Your roughing form will probably be shorter than the strip, but don’t worry, just move the strip when one part is done. Take quite a few passes with the plane until there is a flat surface and you are almost to the level of the form, then stop. Don’t take it all the way down to flush with the form. Now flip the strip over and take a few passes on the other side. Is is not essential to come out with a perfect looking strip on this strip. All we are trying to do is make the strip fit the final form.

Now is the time to bind the strips together, six tip strips together and six butt strips together. Put the strips enamel side out and form them into shape needed for the rod. Then take your binding thread (NOT the wrapping thread) and get ready to go. Set the thread on the bench aput the phone books between the thread and where you want to wrap the rod. Take the thread end and open the phone book and put the thread through the phone book and close it. Pull on the thread a little to test the resistance. If not enough, place another book on top of the phone book and so on until you have some tension there. Start at the butt end of the rod and wrap by turning the rod in your hand gradually going up the blank with the thread. The gap between wraps should be around ¼” at this point. Wrap all the way to the tip, then reverse the wrap and go back down. Turn the blank when you reverse the wrap so the wraps form a triangular pattern going back down the blank. Once you reach the butt again, put a couple or three half hitches in the thread to hold it in place. Now do the same with the other six strips. Do not use nylon thread for this step as it will melt and make a terrible mess.

Now fire up the oven! Put a couple unbeveled extra strips in the oven for a test. Get the oven to around 350 degrees and set your timer. Allow the strips to cook nine or ten minutes at 350 then open the cap on the oven, take the strips out and turn them the opposite direction and close the cap. (NOTE! Make sure you use good gloves to open the oven and grab the strips. They will be very hot!) Once the test strips are done, allow them to cool. Then take a strip section of about 6 or 8 inches between your hands and bend it gradually until it breaks. If it breaks clean, there is a problem. You should ideally have some stringy strips sticking out of the broken area and they should be on both sides of the break. If this happens, good job, you probably have done it correctly and your strips are heat treated. If it doesn’t, vary the heating regimen until you get strips that break like that. Vary the time, heat and others until correct.

If you have decided to not use the oven due to the flaming, skip the previous step. I will tell you that while fine for this rod, heat treating may add some additional tempering which will probably help over the long haul.

Once set correctly, stick the wrapped blank sections in the oven and heat until it is time to turn them around. Do that and allow to heat until your time limit has been reached. Take out, allow to cool, and cut the string off.

It is now time for the final forms and planning process.

You will need your final forms, the necessary tools to adjust them, and a dial depth indicator. The depth indicator will tell you how many thousandths of an inch you have the particular form stations set for.

Let’s start on the bigger grooved side of the forms. These are for the butt section of the rod. Using the larger groove first will allow you to become comfortable with the process before moving on to the finer tip strips.

Look at the particular taper you have decided to make. Take the measurements of the various stations and divide them by 2. Add one to two thousandths for sanding to this number. This is your form setting for that station. Start to set your forms at the tip of the butt by using the dial indicator. Tighten each station as you go by tightening either the push or pull screw then tightening the opposite screw until the desired setting is reached. By tightening one screw against the other, you are firming the setting up and making sure the forms will not stray on your measurement. Continue to the next station and so on. Once you have set all the stations on your form, measure the length of the final strips you will need on the form. Take the permanent marker and make a mark where the tip part ends and als make a mark where the butt section ends. Then make a mark below the butt section mark about an inch. This is the strip alignment mark and will allow you a mark on where to set each strip so that the butts line up when you go to put the strips together. Now take the clamp we used previous and clamp the very butt end of the strip. Take the plane and make certain the strip is solidly down against the form and take three or four passes with the plane. Keep track of how many passes at this point. Release the clamp and turn the strip over. Take the same number of passes on this side and repeat the whole process. EXCEPT now when we work the passes on the other side when we have finished the passes, remove the clamp, move it up to the middle of the strip and plane the very butt section the same number of passes. Continue doing this on each side alternately until you are planning metal. (I am smiling now because you are getting close) You will hit the form with your plane. This is normal and even desirable at this point. It is the only way I know of to get the strips to the right dimensions. One or two thousandths of an inch at this point is now a big deal. This can make the difference between a good rod and a tomato stake. It can also make one to two line weight differences in the final rod. Make sure you plane all the way to your final dimensions. When finished, remove the strip and put in another and do it all over again. Continue until all butt strips are done. Take the strips and set them aside.

Now set the other side of the form for the tips. Do the same thing you did on the butt section. When done with them, set them aside and we are ready to tape them together.

Now for the fun part. Remember when we aligned the nodes? Now we are going to do the same thing with the strips. Lay the six corresponding strips for either the tip or butt section on your bench or a flat surface. Look at the node placement on each strip. You want the nodes set exactly as we did it before. Strips one and four should have the node in the same location. Strips two and five should be about an inch above that and strips three and six should be about an inch above strips two and five. Got it? Excellent!

Now take the strips in that order and put them together in the correct sequence for the finished rod. While hold them together, take a small piece of masking tape and tape the very end of the strips together. Do the same about half way up the section and do the same at the tip.

Looks like a rod section now, doesn’t it? All right!

Now do the same thing with the other section.

Your binding thread should still be set up. If not, please set it up the same as you did prior to heat treating.

Lay the taped sections on your bench and take a single edge razor blade, exacto knife or similar tool and gently cut at one area where the two strips meet. Cut at this same area all the way up the rod section. Do the same with the other section. Now gently unroll the section while still leaving the tape on the uncut parts. The section should lay out with the apex of the strips pointing up at you.

Now get out the nitrile gloves and glue and put a pair of the gloves on.

Take the glue and gradually spread it across all the sections of the rod that we just laid on the bench. An old toothbrush or small paint brush allows the glue to touch all necessary parts. Don’t worry again, this is messy. Once completed with one section, do the other. Don’t hurry too much here, but also do not fool around. If this glue sets before we bind the sections, we have a major problem. Now take the first section you glued and put the strips together by gently folding the taped pieces up. Once together, start the thread exactly the same way you did prior to heat treating and wrap the section very securely. Do the other section. Ta-da! A glued up rod. Well done, but we are not finished yet. While it is still wet, roll the rod sections under your hand gradually on a very flat surface. This should help align the various strips and result in a straighter section. Take a towel (paper) and wipe off the excess glue. I personally prefer to take the glued up sections at this time and set them on a flat table or bench and weight them gently with paint cans or something similar as the glue sets. I feel it hels with straighter sections. Do not allow the glue to adhere to the bench or you will have a terrible time getting the dry sectionsw loose. This means as the glue sets, you will need to go out, remove the cans, move the rod sections gently (bends at this point are very bad) and put the cans back on.

Leave the sections for at least twenty four hours for the glue to set. Additional time is a good idea.

In this section you have roughed, heat treated, final planed, and glued up your rod. Congratulations on a wonderful achievement.

The next section will deal with the final steps needed to make this into a fly rod you will treasure.