I wanted to take a quick moment to wish you and your families a very happy holiday season. As always I’m deeply grateful for your interest and support for bamboo rods and rodbuilding and I hope you’re looking forward to a happy and prosperous 2012!
-Marc
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So, I hinted a few weeks back that Junior and I had something fun in the works, and here it finally is! It all started because I needed to make some reel seat acorn caps for a rod and so Junior thought it would be fun to bring his camera into the shop and try shooting some video of the process, step-by-step. Neither of us really have any experience with video, but we thought we’d just give it a shot and the result is what you see below. Let us know what you think!
-Marc
Here is a nice still shot from the opening of the video:
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Going through a few photos sent to me over the course of the year. Nice salmon and an even nicer fly rod!
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It’s been a hectic stretch in the shop (hence the relative lack of posts here lately) but Junior and I took a day during the Thanksgiving break to work on a little side project that we’ve been planning for a while. I’ll spill more about it later but in the meantime I thought I’d leave this photo as a little hint. One the left is a form tool that was made by a friend of Jim Payne’s during the 1940′s and which I use to make acorn caps to go on some of my reel seats. I’ve always loved the way these look and this gives you a pretty clear idea of how they’re machined. More to come later!
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Well I finally got back from Danbury earlier this evening and managed to unpack my things and eat a little dinner before getting ready to turn in. I was even too tired to manage a fly or two at the bench!
Danbury, of course, was the site of this year’s Art of the Angler show, an event put on by the Catskill Fly Fishing Center and Museum. It was a great show again this year with good turnout and the chance to see a lot of old friends. Kudos to Jim, Erin, and all of the other CFFCM folks who helped put this on, as well as to all of the volunteers and folks who donated items to the dinner raffle fundraiser.
I managed to snap a few photos of my display case and of the general museum floor which I’ll add below. To see a whole lot more photos from this event, the best thing to do would be to visit the Catskill Museum facebook page which is updated pretty often.
As for me I’m off to bed!
-Marc
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Well the milling machine upgrade is finally working, so I thought I’d post a few photos of it in action. It’s a Hardinge TM-UM that I thought would be great for doing reel seats so I bought it and have been monkeying around with it for the last few weeks trying to get it ready to go. It’s in good shape but as with all new machines (or new to me) it needed a lot of fiddling with in order to get it set up exactly as I wanted it.
Making reel seats is a fairly long process which I can’t really do justice to here, but below are a few shots where the milling machine is involved, just to give you a sense of why its important to have a good quality piece of machinery for this part of the job. Since this is the machine that helps take the raw wood cylinder and gives it the shape of a proper reel seat, it’s not the kind of thing you want to do shoddily with inferior equipment (especially if you’re using very high quality, and often quite expensive, wood).
Anyway, below are some pictures in various stages of the process.
As you can see the cut that the milling machine takes off is what creates the place where the reel foot rests. There is a lot more work though, to get it to where it’s ready to be mounted on a rod and looking a little more like one of these:
Of course sometimes there are other little additions that I’ll do, as with a seat I’m currently working on for a customer. With this seat I took the finished reel seat blank, switched parts on the milling machine, and cut several thin grooves in the seat.
The result is something that looks a little more like this – a seat with some beautiful nickel silver half-rails which I fit into the grooves. Not only do they look nice but they also keep the sliding band up off the finished varnish of the wood spacer. And then it’s ready to finally go on the rod!
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My new — and upgraded — milling machine, used here to cut slots for inlaying nickel silver rails into a reel seat. More details to come.
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This week’s sign that the apocalypse is upon us – a fly pattern encyclopedia iphone app: http://www.fishingfliesencyclopedia.com/
Atlantic salmon returning to Credit river: http://bit.ly/oQJwuD
Congratulations to Hardy Cup Winners Masaki Takemoto (1st), Jin Woo Lee (2nd), and Mike MacFarlane (3rd): http://bit.ly/qHPZVX
Atlantic Salmon poacher in vermont gets nabbed by tracking device: http://bit.ly/q0hJze
Judge rejects Gov’s Columbia river basin plan (yet again): http://bit.ly/odXd7X
Irene takes out Vermont’s oldest trout hatchery (http://bit.ly/neWa8k) & USFW employees also forced to rescue displaced salmon at another: http://asf.ca/news.php?id=751
Salmon Re-colonizing the Thames? http://bit.ly/qn2zpp
NYT: Salmon Fishing on Ireland’s River Moy: http://nyti.ms/oJc5c1
See Irene’s flooding in Connecticut River Watershed from Space: http://1.usa.gov/nPk9OJ
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What a week. It’s been a tough one here in Franklin county where Irene has left many of the communities here trying to reckon with the results of some truly epic flooding. It’s rare for this part of the country to make national news, and you never hope to make it for something like this, but that’s what has happened.
The long and short is that the Connecticut River watershed received far more than it could handle and many homes and businesses that were in low-lying areas got hit pretty hard, in addition to many roads, bridges, etc., that were on or near existing water.
The above photo is of nearby Shelburne Falls, MA, which was frequently in the news as an example of some of the worst flooding (It’s also where Per Brandin has his shop but he’s doing fine, though he almost had to evacuate when there were concerns about a potential dam breach upstream). The left-hand side is where the river channel normally is while the right is where the road is (or used to be).
Some other rodmakers I know weren’t so lucky however, especially those in Vermont. If you remember your rodmaking history, you’ll know it’s not the first time Vermont rodmakers have dealt with flooding (the old Chubb Rod Co. in Post Mills, VT, was damaged by floods several times, including in 1869 when the entire shop was destroyed). It appears, unfortunately, that history has repeated itself.
Bob Gorman, of Green River rods, got hit especially hard. I snapped these photos at his shop in Southern Vermont a few days after he had returned home after having been evacuated just before the height of the storm. The first two show the sand and silt deposits left behind by the flooding, and the last shows Bob’s airstream trailer which was washed downstream and pulverized after being wrapped around a tree. The shop itself was also damaged pretty badly after the floodwaters excavated foundation material from under shop and deposited a 2 1/2 foot sand dune on the porch and downstream side of the building. It was also a foot high in the shop interior.
I also heard from another Vermont rodmaker, Dave Kenney, whose shop is up in the Montpelier area and who reports losing a stock of seasoned bamboo and some machinery to Irene. While unfortunately there isn’t much to be done about the machinery, I thought that it might be a nice idea for any rodmakers who have some extra bamboo to donate it to Dave so that he can start to get back on his feet. If that’s you then feel free to shoot me an email or else by emailing [email protected].
If there are other rodmakers in the area who have things to report feel free to send them my way and I’ll post them here. Hopefully we can all help these guys get going again. Rodmaking is a hard enough job without things like this happening, so I figure it’s the least we can do.
Best,
Marc
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