The Angler’s Workshop.—I. 
Fishing Rod Making for the Beginner 
By PERRY D. FRAZER 
T HERE are so many anglers who take pleas¬ 
ure in making and repairing their own 
rods and fishing tackle that I have 
and set down some simple hints that may be of 
use to anglers who are not as yet skilled in work 
of this character. Like most of them, I have 
worked with few and simple tools. The methods 
I shall describe may seem amateurish and crude 
to the skilled professional rodmaker, but the 
novice who is guided by them will pass many 
a pleasant hour, and will turn out rods of which 
he should be proud. 
The work described is that which the novice 
can perform with the plainest tools, principally 
file, sandpaper, jackknife and plane. 
A Review of Fishing Rod History. 
When we speak of fishing rods to-day, refer¬ 
ence is invariably made to those rods that con¬ 
sist, of two or three parts and fitted with splices 
or ferrules for greater convenience in carrying 
to and from the fishing grounds. 
Without question the best rod is one made 
of a single piece, or of strips rent and glued, 
but with no joint or ferrule to interfere with 
its resilience and action. 
That it is next to impossible to carry a full 
length rod on trains and in other conveyances is 
obvious; hence the skill of amateur and pro¬ 
fessional rodmakers is constantly directed to¬ 
ward the task of making the two and three joint 
rods as nearly perfect in every way as is possi¬ 
ble under the circumstances. That they succeed 
very well indeed is evident in the beautiful rods 
now used in fishing and in tournament casting. 
For several centuries all of the best fishing 
rods were made in Great Britain. There solid 
wood rods were the favorites; in fact—with the 
exception of rods made with spliced cane and 
whalebone tips—the only rods used until a com¬ 
paratively short time ago, when the rent and 
glued cane rods invented and made by Ameri¬ 
cans were adopted abroad. Even to-day solid 
wood rods are very extensively used in Great 
Britain. Their manufacturers have never been 
very successful in competing with the best Ameri¬ 
can hexagonal split bamboo rods, and many of 
their fly-rods are made up from split-and-glued 
material purchased in the LTnited States and sold 
as English rods. High grade American split 
bamboo rods, too, are well known and liked over 
there. 
Hickory has been largely used in England for 
parts of medium and heavy fly-rods, the material 
being shipped from the United States and Canada 
in billet form. Other materials are: Ash, lance- 
wood, whalebone and cane combined; ash and 
lancewood in combination; willow blue mahoe, 
washaba (our bethabara), whole cane, green- 
heart, and greenheart and whole cane combined. 
For a number of years greenheart alone, or 
greenheart in combination with whole cane, was 
a standard rod material there, but this is of com¬ 
paratively recent adoption, as angling writers of 
fifty years ago seldom refer to greenheart. Al¬ 
fred Ronalds, writing in 1836, said: 
“The best materials are, ash for the stock, 
lancewood for the middle, and bamboo for the 
top.” 
Mr. Ronalds had in mind the whole bamboo 
which, according to later writers, was first im¬ 
ported into England by army officers returning 
from India. They, however, looked on it with 
favor because it was ideal for lances, and per¬ 
haps their preference for the thick-walled canes, 
now called “male” bamboos, led to the belief that 
was prevalent for many years, that this was bet¬ 
ter for rod making purposes than the thin- 
walled “female” canes. Exhaustive tests with 
scientific instruments have proved the thin- 
walled bamboo better for the purpose. 
Theophilus South, in his “Fly-Fisher’s Text 
Book” (London, 1845), prefers ash to willow 
for butts, hickory for middle joints, and favors 
tips made from lancewood. cane and whalebone, 
spliced together—four and even five pieces in 
a tip. 
The African greenheart, obtainable in the yards 
of the importers in Stanley road, Liverpool, is 
probably much better material for fishing rods 
than the greenheart sold in the United States, 
which comes from various places in the tropics. 
That which comes through Liverpool is picked 
over by the British buyers, and our importers 
must take what is left. This probably accounts 
for the growing scarcity of first class green¬ 
heart. Not a few of our rodmakers decline to 
guarantee this material, which is most excellent 
for the purpose when it is good. 
Early fishing rod materials in the United 
States were: ash and lancewood in combination; 
hickory, mahoe, greenheart, washaba (betha¬ 
bara), snakewood, beefwood, cedar, osage orange, 
shadblow, ironwood, dagama, peppercane, Cal¬ 
cutta bamboo, our Southern canes, jucara prieto 
and many others. 
Years ago it became a common practice to 
saw or rive strips of wood, plane these square, 
glue four pieces together and plane round to 
form rod joints. The belief was that joints so 
made were much stronger and less likely to break 
than would be the case with a joint made from 
a single piece of wood. This method was fol¬ 
lowed by splitting strips of bamboo, planing two 
sides of each strip and gluing four of them to¬ 
gether to form a joint, then planing the latter 
round. This was made possible by placing the 
enamel side of the bamboo within the strip, as 
shown by the shaded lines in Fig. X. 
The enamel surface being slightly convex, it 
was difficult to work and glue these strips to 
form nice joints, and this method, which seems 
to be ideal in other respects, gave way to one 
in which the enamel was placed on the outside, 
and the section made almost octagonal in form 
by means of planing off the corners, as shown 
by the dotted lines in Fig. 2. This method is 
still followed to a certain extent by amateurs 
in making tips, and for the beginner at split 
bamboo rod making, it has many points of ex¬ 
cellence. The principal ones are that it is easier 
to make a joint of four than six pieces, and if 
these are carefully fitted, glued and varnished 
a fairly good rod is the result. 
It is possible the manufacture of these four- 
strip rods of solid wood or cane, and the diffi¬ 
culty in keeping water out of them with the in¬ 
ferior glue and varnish then available, resulted 
in the method often followed of winding joints 
solidly with silk thread or narrow .silk tape. 
This made the rod soft or logy and was dis¬ 
carded finally, to be revived in recent years, and 
again discarded. 
The four-section cane rods gave way to six- 
strip rods, and these have come to stay. They 
have been used successfully for the past genera¬ 
tion and have outlived their offshoots, the eight- 
strip, the seven-strip and the steel-centered single 
and double-built rods, showing that they are 
based on very sound principles. 
It is the belief among rodmakers that in a 
hexagonal rod the upper and the lower strips 
are called upon to perform the greater part of 
the work of casting and playing a fish, but the 
strain on the upper strip is supported, not by 
the lower strip alone, but by the three lower 
strips, as shown in Fig. 3. 
When the greatest strain falls on the lower 
strip, the three upper strips support it, as pic¬ 
tured in Fig. 4. This seems to be borne out 
by the fact that in tournament casting—the 
hardest work a fly-rod is called upon to per¬ 
form—it frequently occurs that the lower strip 
