201201 - Issue 46 Description

January 2012
Issue 46

Power Fibers is published in Adobe Acrobat format. To view the magazine, you must download the Adobe Acrobat Reader. You can get it here.

To get this issue, order the 2012 Issue CD on the “Backissue CDs” page.

The January, 2012 issue of Power Fibers contains:

The Italian Job: Living the Bamboo New Age II

This brief article aims to go a little more deeply into some aspects that have been described in the previous article published in the October Issue of the Power Fibers magazine with the title Living the Bamboo New Age: the Italian Job.

As usual, I’ll approach these technical issues using simplicity, avoiding a pure mathematical and scientific approach in order to make these ideas easily understood and discussed....

Taking Care of Your Bamboo

So you took the plunge and bought some bamboo, now what? I’ve wanted to write an article for a while now in regard to how to handle bamboo once you get it home. This topic in theory seems very elementary; however, with the number of new bamboo rod makers that join the listserv every year, it seems to come up as a discussion point from time to time. As with anything in rod making, there are many different ways to accomplish the same thing and no one way is right, but in the following pictures and narrative, I will share with you the way...

Applying CA to Cocobolo

One of the prettiest woods out there is Cocobolo. It is also one of the hardest to accept a finish.

Someone asked me how I apply CA to cocobolo at the pen club meeting and here's my method.

Here we have a piece of BOW, a nice Chokecherry Burl, a Xcut Cocobolo and a piece of Rocky Mountain Juniper...

History of Cork

Cork is the bark of cork oak (Quercus Suber L), a noble tree with very special characteristics that grows in Mediterranean regions such as Spain, Italy, France, Morocco, Algeria, and especially Portugal, where there are more than 720,000 hectares of cork oak forests, as well as a cork industry of great economic importance. It is an astonishing tree of great longevity and a great capacity for regeneration. It can live on average 150 to 200 years....

Making Bamboo Ferrules

It is a known fact that bamboo ferrules offer a more continuous action, a smaller weight, and a much better balance to a rod, than the classic ferrules made of nickel-silver, standard ferrules or even Super Z.

Making better, lighter rods is the desire of any bamboo maker.

Having this in my mind, I have tried to work a way out to make these ferrules in a simple manner, with fewer tools and less effort. My method is based on the height difference between the stations of the planing form. The height is in direct connection...

Rod Drying Box

As I have never been asked to write an article for anyone outside of college, I was flattered when Todd contacted me and asked me to do a piece on a drying box I had built. I made the box a few years ago after becoming frustrated with trying to keep dust and other objects off of my drying rods.

As any rod builder knows, dust, lint, pet hair, and any other object that is floating around in your rod building room seems to be drawn to your wet finish like a trout to a mayfly hatch. One day I was redoing the finish on one particular rod for the third time, I finally had enough. I jumped online and took a look at different styles of drying boxes...

The Cabin Build

Here´s the story of how I fell in love with a place and bought a piece of property with no road to it and how I travelled a few times a year in eight years to build what I´ve been wanting for a long time. A logged fishing cabin on a river in the high country up north.

I first came to the area in the early eighties with my childhood friend who already had a cabin up there as he wanted to show it to me as well as the nice surroundings. It´s really a nice place with fishing pretty much all over and if you just get off the main...

January 2012Issue 46