Schroedinger

You may wonder why someone would choose to fish with split bamboo rods these days. Many better alternative rod making materials have been developed over the last fifty years, right? Such as glass fibre (solid, then hollow, with phenolic resins originally, then later polyester and epoxy resins), carbon fibre or graphite, in ever better, faster, higher modulus varieties, or boron.

Well, that’s a long story - do you have some time? Honestly, between you and me, those modern materials are not necessarily better for making actual fishing rods than bamboo - tonkin cane or other - especially not for light spinning or fly rods. The rise of glass fibre as rod building material, as a replacement for bamboo is due more to the (American) trade embargo against China in the early 1950s, that also included importation of raw materials such as tonkin cane, than to the superior properties of glass fibre for making fishing rods. Especially when considering the glass fibre and resins that were available in the ‘50s.

By the way, it’s quite interesting to follow the development of glass fibre as a rod building material by perusing patents from that era. To my surprise I discovered that the (solid) glass fibre fly rod is actually a French invention. made by an engineer, one Henri Dubois, employed by the French electricity company (who were experimenting with resin-impregnated fibre materials as insulation at the time), who first offered his invention to famed French rod manufacturers Pezon&Michel, who dismissed him and his idea out of hand. He then offered his invention to LibbyOwensFord, a major US glass manufacturer, and the rest, as they say, is history. Interestingly, Dubois probably realized that (solid) glass fibre is actually not really a very good rod building material - certainly not better than bamboo: the patent cites primarily second-rate arguments for glass fibre over tonkin cane, such as ‘uniformity’ (both within and between rods) and ‘imperviousness to water’, obviating the need to varnish a rod. All this so not to have to admit that the actual fishing and casting properties of the material were inferior to bamboo…

The same can be said for carbon fibre - also taking into account the state of the material in the 1970s when graphite started to replace glass fibre as a rod building material. The graphite materials available at the time were certainly better than the glass fibre of the day (not least because of the better resins employed), that had all but replaced bamboo as a rod building material, but certainly not better overall than splitcane. And what about boron fibres? That was just a mistake waiting to happen - the material has better specifications than carbon fibre on paper, but was unsuited for manufacturing fibres that were suitable for making fishing rods. These days, Winston are the last outfit to still nominally use boron-containing materials for some of their rod range, and even those are made primarily from carbon fibre (and resin), with only a tiny amount of boron.

My primary motivation for making rods from bamboo, next of course to the intrinsic properties of the material and the rods that are made from it (which I will address elsewhere) is the fact that, other than with fibre-reinforced plastic materials, where you are always at the mercy of what designs a supplier is willing to sell you, with bamboo it is relatively easy and straightforward as an individual rod maker to design and make your own tapers. That doesn’t mean that designing tapers is in and of itself easy - that requires some serious study, and the making of a significant number of prototypes, to find out just how material and tapers blend into rod properties. but it is certainly possible. And even if you do not want to invest the time to get to that point, there are sufficient published tapers (expressed as diameters at certain stations of a blank, basically a recipe for making a specific rod) to choose from to make your own rod, and possibly start tweaking that rod to get something that suits your casting and fishing style. You could e.g. lighten the tip, or make a swelled butt. Or make a hollowed blank, or give it some more backbone. Or use a revolutionary glue system - if you can obtain that. All things you could never do with  plastic rod blank.