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Jim Burchette restored an old glass rod - stripped and rebuilt it - and it came out as good as new

A couple months ago my wife said she had found the perfect gift for me. She had arranged for me to take a bamboo fly rod making class.

If you thought your rod had good cork, watch Andy Royer pick out the really good stuff

We had some fun tonight with a bunch of CTS-rods built by Danish Ussing & Bech

Now, we all know that winter is the season for building rods. Not that you can't build rods during the rest of the year, but since much fishing is closed during the winter, it makes sense to do your indoors chores in the dark part of the year. I my part of the world, that is right now.
Winter time is also an excellent time to watch DVD's. The longer the better almost. Watching DVD's can entertain and bring memories - and educate.
This DVD-set is a combination of the latter, educating part and the first, the rod building part.

We're now at the final stage of our rod buidling process, and ready to coat the wrappings. this requires a clean room and a lot of care. Jan-Ole Willers shows us in great detail how to do the best job and where to do it.

The handle is both an important part of any rod and a whole project in itself when building a rod. Jan-Ole Willers helps you choose a shape, select the cork and plan added features such as a fighting butt.

The rod is done and you need to determine what line is best for it. Don't always trust the fine print on the blank, but join Jan-Ole Willers on the water for a test of the newly built rod to find out whether it was worth the effort.

This time we look at guide selection and preparation as well as the critical process of wrapping the guides. Learn some neat tricks from German Jan-Ole Willers in this third part of his extensive rod building series.

The first part of the Global Flyfisher article series on building your own graphite fly rod, which takes you by the hand from the very beginning of the process: identifying and selecting the parts and materials you need.

The introduction to the cover-it-all series on building your own grpahite fly rod, which will run through the whole process of building a complete fly rod, covering selection of components, handle, guides, coating and testing.

One of the hallmarks of rod builder Dave Lewis' work is the handwritten details on each rod. The writing is done by Dave's wife Mary Lu and in this article Dave briefly explains how to obtain the best results when writing on rods.

This past season, I had the pleasure of fishing rods built from two blanks from Lamiglas, the XMG50 and the "Blue Ridge". These two blanks are Ying and Yang, fast and slow, high modulus graphite and fiberglass. As different as can be.

This is a fantastic journey! And in more than one sense. It's both a journey from east to west - from China to the US - and at the same time a journey in materials and workmanship from a perennial grass to some of the longest lasting fishing rods we have seen - split cane rods. And it's narrator and writer David James Duncan's mental and physical journey through something, which he evidently carries very deep in his heart.

I'm a sucker for a good piece of wood

Follow along as Harry Boyd takes us through the process of trimming the bamboo blank to the proper length, preparing and mounting your ferrules, and adjusting the fit of the ferrules. Many thanks to Harry for this well received series of articles.

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On your knees, casting to a small spot fifteen or twenty feet away. Float the line behind you and then "flick" the line foward. Man, I love this rod for that kind of fishing. It's like it knows what I want to do and casts a perfect narrow loop with impressive speed.

Andy Dear hits a home run with his custom reel seat spacers and complete reel seats. It's a rare thing for a product to get a "Global Class" GFF rating, but Andy's woodworking skills earn him that high honor easily.

The grand prize for the Flymeister 2001 contest was a custom built fly rod made by Neal Hall, owner of Classic Destiny rods and president of the Custom Rod Builder's Guild.

Want a great and affordable gift for a flyfisherman - or a little treat for yourself?

Here is good suggestion: a fun little book, written by a man with stories to tell and a big heart for humour, fishing and rod building.

And the book is only 10 US dollars!

Now that we have our strips of bamboo tapered into sections for our fly rod, the next step is to glue these strips together into whole rod sections.

Not only do all the major rod companies sell their blanks, there are several companies that produce and sell only blanks. Where to begin? Rainshadow might be one choice. Great, afordable blanks.

As we've alluded to in other articles, making your own grips from cork rings is an important part of building a custom rod. "Staying with the cost-effective strategy, I decided to try and build my own cork lathe using common materials and a drill." Read more of Jon Jenkin's article.

There are two basic strategies for building a cork grip for a fly rod. The first involves gluing the rings directly onto the rod blank and then shaping the grip. Another way involves gluing the cork rings together off the blank, and then shaping the grip in a lathe setup before reaming and fitting to the rod blank. That process is described by Bob Petti in this article.

Harry Boyd teaches us the tools and techniques required to turn strips of bamboo into tapered sections of a fly rod in Part 5 of his continuing series.

Split cane: In the fourth installment of Harry Boyd's series on bulding bamboo fly rods, he describes the tools and processes of binding strips together and then heat-treating them in some sort of oven.

This is the third section of Harry Boyd's continuing bamboo rod course. Here we begin to mold the raw bamboo into something that approaches the shape and form of a fly rod, and the real fun begins. Read more in Part 3 - Staggering Nodes and Rough Planing.

Harry Boyd continues his series on the construction of bamboo fly rods with a look at selecting, preparing, and splitting your culms of tonkin bamboo.

Harry Boyd tells us "Since Hiram Leonard and the earliest days of fly fishing in our country, the allure of fine spilt bamboo rods has been part of the magic of our sport." Read Harry's introduction to his series of articles on building bamboo fly rods.

You have one extra rod with no sock and rod tube. You've been putting off buying a tube...why don't you just make your own?! With $4.00 and about a 1/2 hour's time, you'll have a DIY rod tube. These won't win beauty contests, but they work just as well as any retail version. Read here how to DIY.

In the world of fly fishing in the 21st Century, Lamiglas is making some of the best blanks available to anyone, anywhere, for any price. In this review by GFF Partner Bob Petti we look at the Perigee blank, which is only available to custom rod builders. He concludes: "People like rods made from Perigee blanks simply because they make excellent fishing rods." Read Bob's Review.

GFF's own bamboo rod expert and maker of these beautiful rods. Best known for his extremely popular series on making your own bamboo rods.

Tom Kirkman's book "Rod Building Guide" is a cover-to-cover brain dump of the author's experience building all manner of fishing rods. He doesn't tell the reader as much how to do things, as he does why, and almost as importantly, why not.

"In many ways, it was a rod builder's dream finish." Bob Petti writes about Trondak U-40 Duragloss LS Supreme and hands out one of the rare Global Class scores of 6 in his review. He also looks at Trondak's U-40 Rod Bond, which 'only' scores a 5.

Rod builder Dave Lewis of Performance Flyrods teaches you how to finish a cork grip. Dave covers the whole process from selecting cork over glueing to the final shaping.

How Ib Olsen builds his beautiful rods ...and some elementary notes.