Finer Points of Rodmaking
People have stated how well balanced the rods I make feel in the hand and I would like to go into some detail
of some of the things I do in the process, that I believe, truly help me maintain the quality I try to put into each and every rod
I make.
Trust nothing and leave nothing to chance.
I have a couple of rodmaker buddies who constantly preach to me “Ren, you’ve got
to trust your tools, if you want to speed up production”. Well, there is nothing more I would like than to speed up my production
times but, my name goes onto each and every rod and its components that I build and quality is just tough to control if you’re banging
out rods to impress yourself or to make a greater amount of income off of your product.
The truth is I trust nothing. I check, recheck
and then check again my plane forms once I set them. Then I let them sit a bit (for an hour or so), then check one last time. Low
and behold there’s always one station that needs tweaking. Once I’m settled in my mind that the heat in the workshop is stable and
that there will be no further temperature change to expand or contract the metal forms, I begin the planning process.
At this point
I should point out that, as a young boy, I apprenticed with a Spanish cabinetmaker who for the first year and a half, would only let
me sharpen his chisels and plane blades. Occasionally, I would hold pieces of lumber in place while he did what he had to do, but
that was about it. I did notice though, that after every piece of lumber was worked on, he would caress, wiggle, sight, and
otherwise fiddle with, and after adjusting, always end up with “Ahora si”, or “Now it’s right”. I mean every single piece went through
this scrutiny and adjustment period. I thought he was nuts, until he explained to me that everything in nature has balance, and that
to attain that, each component making up the piece, had to also have balance, it had to feel balanced in the hand.
With this in mind,
as I plane each strip to dimension, I am constantly lifting it off the form and checking for balance. I take the strip, apex side
down and place the apex in the first joint of my index finger, then lightly but firmly, wrap the rest of my fingers around the butt
end of the strip and slowly flex it up and down as if jigging a rod. Believe it or not, the strip will tell me exactly what’s happening
every time. If I feel more pressure on the second pad of my index finger, I know that that side of the strip has more weight on it,
so I need to adjust that side by planning an extra bit, maybe one more pass of the plane. If I feel the pressure or weight on the
first pad, I must adjust that side of the strip accordingly.
Another thing I’m constantly doing during the planning process is brushing
off the debris, even if I don’t see any, off of the planning forms. Let me explain why. To some it might be more obvious than others.
One one-thousandth of an inch is one quarter of the diameter of a brunette human hair. The average hair then, if sliced lengthwise,
into four lengths should equal one one-thousandth of an inch. Now, to the average Joe, this isn’t a whole lot but, to a rod four to
six thousandths of an inch equal one line size up or down. Now try to imagine the chaos it would cause the strips if you had different
sized strips pulling and pushing against each other while casting. It would throw the entirety of the rod into disarray. It would
lose its balanced feel.
There are other things I do, probably a little out of the ordinary, to obtain and maintain the quality of my
rods which I will cover at some other time in the future.
Thanks,
Ren Monllor
