With respect Beresford, hand made so called 'luxury goods' are often made with very great care and attention, by their nature are limited in quantity and can fetch a premium price due to the time taken to make them. Will a hand made rod, without the use of mechanical cutting tools be 'better' than a rod made using small wheel cutters to dimension the strips, probably not. Then again, an Intrepid Rimfly performs no better and no worse than a Hardy Perfect, they are just different.
My point was that for a couple of thousand pounds (or more) I would expect the rod that I buy to be a hand made item. In the world of reels that is known as 'bench made' meaning one craftman would create the reel of his (mostly) own design..from scratch -not buying in the components made by others, most importantly not using a CNC machine. Manual lathes are perfectly acceptable as there is no other way to round a reel, the reel maker winds the handle while the alloy is in the lathe,taking off amounts of metal according to pattern. He will measure as he goes, it is a manual excercise to all intents. John Milner is one such reel maker, Ted Godfrey another, even making each of the n/silver screws himself..
This is quite different from -presetting a cutting machine and feeding the rod strips through. There were bamboo rods for many years before the 50's and 60's, they were hand planed until (in the case of Hardys, until L R Hardy devised one of the first bamboo dimensioning cutting machines in the UK). The production rods of the 50's and 60's were ,apart from the top names (Hardy etc) often indifferently made and to a price. There was a relatively short period between production bamboo rods becoming widespread and the advent of glass which then sounded their eventual death knell.
That what examples remain, being now cherished and 'desirable' , fine. However according to auctioneer Neil Freeman, bamboo rods do not often become desirable enough to fetch very high prices, in (what he calls) the 'garden cane corner' of his Angling Auctions, in London. In the same vein, coarse anglers traditionally have never been as willing to pay premium prices for their tackle as their fly fishing counterparts. This is one of the reasons (possibly) that there are probably less than a handful of UK professional rodmakers. There are those who have the disposable income to buy a new bamboo (coarse) rod, but will often do so only if there is a 'name' attached so that the cost may be justified and if need be some of the outlay may be re-couped if re sold. The many older coarse rods that are purchased on line and refurbished for very little money also means that makers of new rods like myself (hobbyists or not) will not be much in demand. UK bamboo makers may eventually number only one or two at best for these reasons, it will be a case of use them or lose them.
I have made two or three coarse rods comissioned for the UK, the most that I could make for a MK IV was 350 pounds, which did not include customs or tax as I had a relative take it over. That is not much money for wrestling those big strips into submission, using a ton of quality cork, a big n/silver ferrrule and some rare new agate rings and also a custom rod bag. As I said, 34 hours went into making the hand made blank itself, as Paul wrote I do not have business overheads as such, but even so.. I have been asked by one on this forum to make them a rod, I politely declined reasoning that I could sell a dainty fly rod for double, on this side of the pond.
The last word I will leave to Richard James (Rod Maker) of Shilbottle, Alnwick who is (or was) a very traditional English rodmaker, I wonder if any on this forum have heard of him. With an excerpt from a lengthy letter that he wrote to me when I was just starting off, and an excerpt from Country Life Magazine 1992 about him. The last that I read (or heard) of Richard (Dickie) James was in an editorial in Trout & Salmon which mentioned that his workshop/shed had been set on fire by vandals and many/most of his treasured rod 'blocks' had been destroyed. The magazine was asking readers for contributions to a fund to help Mr James out.
Country Life.
'...Northumberland's Richard James is one such maker. He started making rods after leaving the army in the 1950's and has been working with cane ever since. He learned his craft at the rod-makers Walker Bramptons and has in his day, built rods for Hardys (until 1984) and Farlows. He is adament that cane rods should be made by hand with no machine cutting and maintains that nothing but nothing beats it as a material.
Mr James splits and dries the Tonkin(?ed) by hand and then rough and smooth planes the six strips which make up the hexagonal shape of the built cane rod against original tapered blocks of which he has many patterns of the past. Mr James insists that working by hand is the only way to get the feel for the taper of the cane necessary to produce the extraordinary fine and sensitive tips to the rods. He also makes his own ferrules, reel seats and rod stoppers. The finished products can be called reasonably priced masterpieces.'
From his letter to me ( I had asked about the '1882 method'....)
' 1882 method of cane building, basically means that the original Alnwick method was evolved by cabinate makers who worked in cane, originally Calcutta cane (as found in carpets) then in Tonkin poles about 1925. Cane in those days was worked ie split with the grain, straightened individually by heat so that a smoothing plane would follow the grain, and only the hard outer fibres utilised, every process carried out by hand and eye. The tapers for individual rods being cut on individual blocks ( formers) all patterns having it's own set of blocks. I posess over 300 blocks covering over 50 patterns, some blocks being the original 1882.
Under the Trade Description Act of the UK I am the only rod builder who can sign his rods Hand Built (underlined) which I do followed by the anglers name and signed by myself as maker. The modern machine made rods are simply ripped into strips on a circular saw (often across the grain, check it out) then the strips are run through a high speed miling machine which cuts the angle and taper having had first the outer fibre ground away to form the base of the triangle, once a mill machine is set up 50 to 100 rod blanks have to be run off to make the setting up pay, then they have to be finished (all the same length and taper) therefore high powered expensive advertising has to be entered into, to persuade (underlined) the angler that this is the rod he requires, all the cost being passed on.'
I include a copy R Jame's price list, click to enlarge. His were not boutique rods but were built as rods for anglers to fish and were priced accordingly.