The Greenbrier Fly Rod

 

RScott Bamboo Fly Rods and The Big Bamboo Compay

This blog post is about my fly rod company, RScott Bamboo Fly Rods: https://rscottbambooflyrods.com/ and why I started it. 

I am one of those people who has too many hobbies, too many interests, too spread out, unfocused and when I do get interested in something I do a deep dive into it. I read everything there is to read about it. I watch ever video made on the subject, I attend shows, take classes, and totally immerse myself in it. I enjoy the learning process and I love the challenge of mastering new skills. It's kind of an exploration of the world, of reality, of what life is all about. 

Even as a kid I was always curious about things. I remember getting in trouble because I took apart my fathers pocket watch and couldn't get it back together again. I was constantly tinkering with things and I remember watching birds and being fascinated by flight. I built model airplanes from balsa wood and silk when I was 12. Then I learned how to fly them -- both control line and RC. Later I got my pilots license. I loved woodworking and making all kinds of things. I took up blacksmithing, built a forge, and made knives. Then I bought a lathe and taught myself how to machine parts. I learned how to solder, braze and weld metal. But all of these things were always hobbies, things I did when I was not working for a living. 

After a 40 year long career in finance and investing I had built a business that didn't need my full time attention and I knew at some point I would retire from it completely. In preparation for that day I made a New Year's resolution to "find my passion." I wanted to discover one thing that I really loved to do and to focus on that one thing. I gave myself one month to find it. I made a list of all the things I enjoyed doing and pondered each one of them to see if I would enjoy focusing on just one. 

I ending up choosing fishing because it checked off a lot of boxes. It involves being outdoors, it involves writing and photography, it involves travel and exploration, and it involves (or could involve) making fly rods. And making fly rods, especially making bamboo fly rods involves thinking. Unlike making fiberglass or graphite fly rods, making bamboo fly rods require an understanding of tapers and how they affect the action of the fly rod. Every rod I make starts with the design phase -- how long, what weight line, how many sections, what action ... etc. It can easily take a full 8 hour day to complete the design phase and it involves a lot of thinking, which I also enjoy. There is actually a philosophy component to rod design. 

The reason that I took up designing and building bamboo fly rods is that it gives me a chance to make something with my hands that I can see and feel. That's something I never had in my career. Finance is almost entirely a mental exercise and there is nothing to see except numbers on a page. I wanted to create physical objects and then use them in the outdoors and in far away places. Bamboo fly rod making is the perfect avocation for me! I wanted to make a business out of a hobby and a hobby out of starting and running a business. I've been self employed my entire life, so running a business is second nature to me but I've never run a manufacturing business. Making bamboo fly rods one at a time is not a complicated nor a big manufacturing enterprise but it is nonetheless manufacturing.

And the best part is that I don't need to make money at this enterprise. Part of the challenge is to sell a few rods, maybe a more than a few, but if I don't I can still afford to do everything I want to in life.

--RScott

The Road to Modern Bamboo

 In my introductory post I mentioned that it has taken me 50 years to learn how to make a modern bamboo fly rod. How can anything take 50 years to learn? It can take 50 years to learn anything if you had no idea what you were trying to learn it. When I started fly fishing 50 years ago I did not know that 50 years later I would be making bamboo fly rods. The only reason I even learned how to fly fish is that I wanted to fish for Atlantic salmon and the only legal way to fish for Atlantic salmon (at least in North America) is to fly fish for them.

My first fly rod was a Fenwick 8' 8 weight 2 piece fiberglass rod. When you only have one fly rod you really have no way to know how good or bad it is. I knew that all the good salmon fishermen had Fenwick rods--Bartlett, Lippy, Sam Ward, Doc Pason, and Robert Scott. The only thing that is important about a fly rod to a 15 year old is that you have a cool one and the cool one is the one that the really good fly fishermen used. You don't want to look foolish on the river casting with something that's not cool. The Fenwick was very cool. Way cooler than my dad's Orvis Battenkill. That's what I thought then -- now I think that Battenkill is way cooler than those old glass "clunks." 

Clunk is a term I learned from my father. A "clunk" is a crude, heavey, not well balanced fly rod or shotgun. A clunk is a Mossberg but the slim finely made, well balanced LC Smith is not. He didn't have a term for the opposite of clunk. Well made, nicely balanced, beautiful, tight fitting, finely crafted ... just really nice and usually these really nice things are expensive. I don't know where I got my bias towards really nice things, probably my mother, at least as far as the expensive part goes but my father has an appreciation for old school master craftsmanship. It's always better to save your money and buy one really good thing than to own a bunch of junk. 

"Understated elegance," comes to mind. Meaning it's not about being showy -- it's not about impressing others (at least not openly), it's about the feeling you get from owning something that is the very best in terms of functionality and beauty. This is about form following function. A finely made, well balanced side by side shotgun is at the top of the head when it comes to bird guns. It's at the top of the heap because it serves the purpose better than any other type of shotgun. It is light enough that you can easily carry it all day and it will still come up quickly to shoulder. It will swing easily on a fleeting grouse and points naturally to the exact spot that you are looking at.  It is quiet in the woods, no rattles, no loose parts. It opens easily when you need to safely cross over a stonewall. No need to eject a shell. It opens so perfectly that the barrels when open still catch and retain the two live rounds in their chambers. Open with just a tad more force and you can extract those shells easily. 

A handcrafted custom made bamboo fly rod is the embodiment of understated elegance in the fly fishing world. The highest level, state of the art, the crème de la crème of fishing if fly fishing and the pinnacle instrument in the art for fly fishing is the light weight, finely made, well balanced, beautifully finished, artfully embellished bamboo fly rod. Starting with the fiberglass Fenwick, evolving into lighter and lighter graphite, and finally refining, distilling, and extracting the very finest elements of the sport, you naturally and logically end up with this ultimate precision instrument. 

How is a "modern bamboo" fly rod better than a vintage bamboo fly rod? It is different only in the technology used to create it. In the area of adhesives science and technology has given us some of the strongest adhesives ever made. The old hide glues have been replaced by polyvinyl acetates and epoxy resins, shellac and varnish have been replaced by the far superior impregnation process, and cotton thread has been replaced by kevlar. And the treatment of the bamboo itself is more advanced and is still improving through scientific research. The improvements come more slowly as you reach the point of diminishing returns. 

I will cover rod action and casting techniques that are required in the proper use of these highly refined, very light weight and shorter fly rods in another post.