The beginning of the end? An early fibreglass rod

[Deaf Cat]

A treasure, but nowhere near as pretty as cane!

Maker: B James & Son, England.
(From about 1958/9 ? - suggested by "England" but before they renamed to Bruce & Walker in 1959)

14’ 6” hollow fibreglass.
4 piece including detachable butt.
Butt section measures 36.5”: Button, 32” cork handle with doughnut end, 4” spigot. Aluminium fittings.
Then 3 x 49” sections with respectively 2, 3 and 4 “high bell” rings.

When I first saw this I assumed it was bakelite rather than fibreglass, but I have never heard tell of rods made of bakelite, so it must be fibreglass!






It looks a bit like a primitive version of the B&W CTM Match Rod on the wonderful Inthenetuk.com here:
http://www.inthenetuk.com/pages/Vintage ... Walker.asp

Happy New Year!

[Nobby]

I agree, those ferruleless re-inforced joints are very similar, and I guess saving a few grams counts when you are going as long as 14'6" !!!!

Bakelite was one of a group of phenolic plastics that were actually very stiff and brittle( yeah, I am that old) and would not be suitable for a rod at all.

I think that rod is from the very early Sixties and as all rods from that time look the same, that is that you can see the weave of the fibres. I've always presumed that they were from before gel-coat technology came around. By the end of the Sixties the rods have a shiny gel-coat and look no different to a modern carbon rod at a glance.


Rods like that are really quite rare. Imagine the amazement its first owner felt when first he waggled it! So light!

Which is why Richard Walker gave away all his home-made cane rods the moment hefelt a 'glass rod.

I think, in time, these rods will once again be recognised for the great innovation they were one day. And then prices will go up. Some 'glass rods you couldn't give away two years ago are starting to fetch good money lately and one foreign collector i know has sold a lot of cane lately and is re-investing in 'glass!


You heard it here first!

[Haydn Clarke]

And I think Hardy's are again making fly rods in glass, or least with some glass content. As i understand it, glass rods are more durable making more suitable for knockabout rods or when you're in the thick of and likely to be hitting things when casting.

I only own one glass rod, B&W MK IV G, which was pretty much successor to the B. James MKIV RW. It makes quite a nice stalking rod being 10 ft and that's predominantly what I use it for.I still bitterley regret not making the effort to add to my glassware collection and turning up to a local auction house that had a B&W MK IV Avon G in it's pretty rare 11ft guise.

Stupid Boy.

[Davyr]

Which is why Richard Walker gave away all his home-made cane rods the moment hefelt a 'glass rod.

I think it actually took him quite a while to come around to favouring glass over cane.

Certainly, in my copy of "Still-Water Angling" (revised 4th edition, 1975), he has this to say on p39:

"It has been explained to me that you can run into brick walls with glass rods, drop them on a hard floor, or beat down nettles with them, without their suffering damage. For such uses they may be excellent, but I use fishing rods for fishing, and for fishing I prefer split cane."

[Nobby]

Interesting. I wonder when he wrote that. I'm fairly sure he did give the cane rods away, but perhaps not as soon as I had believed then!

[Davyr]

I suspect he was thinking about the early glass rods, which were generally considered "lifeless" compared with cane. Once he got involved with designing (and putting his name on) well-made Hardy hollow glass, he would have sounded a bit daft had he continued to stick with his original impressions of the material!

Anyone know when this was? You'd think post-1975, as he hadn't bothered updating the section quoted above from "Still-Water Angling" by that date, but surely it wasn't that late?

[Nobby]

Well they took out the Walker, Hardy, Phillips patent on carbon fibre in 1971, so was already looking elsewhere by then, surely his support of 'glass is mid-Sixties?




http://www.anglingheritage.org/article~nid~21.htm

[Davyr]

surely his support of 'glass is mid-Sixties?

Very likely - his comments about cane vs glass remaining in the 1975 "not-so-revised-edition" of SWA were there due to sloppy editing, by the sound of things!

[GloucesterOldSpot]

A treasure, but nowhere near as pretty as cane!

Maker: B James & Son, England.
(From about 1958/9 ? - suggested by "England" but before they renamed to Bruce & Walker in 1959)

14’ 6” hollow fibreglass.
4 piece including detachable butt.
Butt section measures 36.5”: Button, 32” cork handle with doughnut end, 4” spigot. Aluminium fittings.
Then 3 x 49” sections with respectively 2, 3 and 4 “high bell” rings.

When I first saw this I assumed it was bakelite rather than fibreglass, but I have never heard tell of rods made of bakelite, so it must be fibreglass!

Pics on Photobucket here:
http://s921.photobucket.com/albums/ad55 ... =slideshow

It looks a bit like a primitive version of the B&W CTM Match Rod on the wonderful Inthenetuk.com here:
http://www.inthenetuk.com/pages/Vintage ... Walker.asp

Happy New Year!

I think it was around 1968/69 that B James became Bruce & Walker. They started making glass rods around the mid sixties, so this one probably dates from 1966-1968.

Bakelite rods? Nooooo. Bakelite is a thermosetting plastic, which is heat-cured to its final shape after which it adopts a very low modulus of elasticity. You might as well try to make a rod from porcelain.

My experience of B James/B&W fibreglass rods is that they are heavy, floppy and worse than split cane. The best glass rods were made by Hardys, either as finished rods bearing their name or as Fibatube blanks. Incidentally, Richard Walker was involved in developing glass rods with Hardys from about 1964 - alongside Fred Taylor and Fred Buller - and subsequently introduced Jim Hardy to a chap he knew at Farnborough who was working with carbon fibre. Hardy's then developed the first prototype carbon rod (sometime around 1972) but thanks to Walker's insistance that the carbon content should be no more than 25%, failed to capitalise on their patent to use the material in fishing rods.

Walker was certainly using glass rods for most, if not all, his coarse fishing by about 1966, though he maintained a preference for cane for fly rods under nine feet long - he rated the Hardy 'Koh-I-Noor' 8'9" #7 rod very highly. The cover photo of Stillwater Angling (1974 edition) shows him playing a Tring bream on a 12' Hardy Matchmaker, and this rod appears in many other photos of him in later life, catching roach, barbel and tench. He even had one made up on the same mandrel but with an extra layer of glass to stiffen it, and used it for float fishing for carp.

[Ron Clay]

What put Walker off the early glass rods was the fact that calculated compound tapers could not be incorporated into the rods.

Then along came the likes of Hardys, Fibretube (owned by Hardys) and Sportex of Germany who started making compound tapered blanks which were very satisfactory indeed. A further innovation was the "ferrule-less" method of joining the sections which cut out a significant amount of weight, which interfered with the handling and action of the rod. And let's face it, a cane rod of 11 feet in three sections with two sets of brass ferrules was darned awful in terms of its action.

Walker went on of course to design many rods in glass fibre some of which were quite superb, especially the Hardys Superlite 7/8 9 foot 3 inch reservoir fly rod which became one the the best selling rods of all time.