It all starts with a 12 foot culm of bamboo

Bamboo Rod Build Part 1- Splitting Cane Continued

Before we continue, I thought I'd offer just a little info on the bamboo itself. The cost of a raw bamboo has little to do with the price of the end product. Even good Tonkin cane, which only grows in a very small area in Southern China because of climate requirements, is only about $30/culm (including the shipping). If everything goes perfectly during splitting, a maker can build two 2-tip rods out of a single culm. That's $15 for for a two-tipped blank! Try buying a top notch graphite blank for $15. A set of ferrules will run you about $40-$60. After that, the expense is no different from building a graphite rod. The expense then is in the intense labor (usually 40 hours or more) required to turn raw bamboo into a fly rod. So let's continue with that labor.

Okay bamboo fans (Anybody still out there?), when I last left you, we had six beautiful 1" strips of bamboo from both the butt and tip section. Now the trick is to spilt each tip strip into four 1/4" strips (24 total) and each of the six butt strips into three 1/3" strips (18 total) . As with skinning a cat, there's a thousand different ways to split bamboo. This system works well for me. It's from the late George Maurer's book: "Fundamentals of Building a Bamboo Fly Rod".

The next thing I'll do is remark each strip on the underside of the strip to maintain relative position. This should be done at about the midpoint between nodes:


Next I'll take my heavy knife and cut off the remains of the inner-nodual dams on the pith side of the strip. Always cut away from yourself (ask me how I know):


Now I move to my 1" belt sander and sand flat the remains of the underside (pith side)of the node. All this work will greatly facilitate further splitting:


Bamboo likes to split in half and resists splitting in thirds because of pressure differentials. Tips strips are now split in half by locating and marking the center of each strip at about the midway point, a couple of inches above a midpoint node:


Then, using my heavy bamboo knife, I center the knife over my mark and sharply strike the knife with a rubber mallet to start the split:


A flathead screwdrver is then placed in the split and the knife is removed:


Leaving the screwdriver in place, I move to the end of my bench and lay the strip pith side down, anchoring the screwdriver in a 2x4, and start pushing the strip into the blade to continue the split. Any time the split wonders off center, I simply force the strip against the thicker side and that usually brings the split back on center. It's important to keep the pith side of the bamboo strip flat against the table to ensure the strip edges will be as close to 90 degrees as possible:


Once I get to one end of the strip, I reverse the strip end to end and finish the split going the other direction:


Now I do the same split to the other five tip strips and I end up with twelve 1/2" strips from the tip section of the culm. The same process is employed for the butt strips, only they are cut into thirds at this point, which is a bit more challenging. Your resulting twelve tip strips should now look something like this:

Notice the blue marker is indicating a leaf node which will render that portion of the strip unusable.