Zach Matthews
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I used a pretty high end facemask that I got at like Home Depot, and definitely long sleeves and gloves and safety glasses.
Clay –
I saw single engine planes landing overhead as I sat at the Southern Soul barbecue and thought of you.
Brian –
I’ve also been told that directly, probably from the same guy who told you.
I think all Orvis premier-level rods, including the Superfine series, are made in their factory in Vermont.
Brian –
I think the more common scenario is the reverse: blanks and componentry made overseas then shipped into the U.S. to be assembled.
So, at least in theory, I am going to be borrowing one of these for a few months in order to give people here in the SE a chance to take a closer look at it.
Chris –
That isn’t the kind of thing you could figure out without measuring out the taper, one because they aren’t going to advertise that and two because it would vary between each rod in the series. There’s no guarantee that the exact same blank would ever appear in another rod series (and it would definitely not have the Sintrix dust, for whatever that’s worth); however you could probably find a taper that is perilously close.
Check your PMs.
Zach
Charlie Craven (Charlie’s Fly Box) is one of the best fly tyers I have ever encountered. I actually shared a room with him for a couple nights down in Mexico – he is a good dude. His permit and bonefish boxes were insane; it was like looking into a museum-grade candy store.
That’s his book on basic fly tying and it would be a good place to get started.
Incidentally here was his box:
Zach
PS, if you want to hear about these nano-particles and their relative effectiveness straight from the horse’s mouth, go back and review Steve Rajeff’s podcast, which was recorded when these things were first being offered around. His comments as I recall were that in order for carbon fiber nanotubes to achieve their potential, the science to grow them longer needed to be in place.
Carbon fiber nanotubes, buckyballs, and a single-layer thick carbon hexagram material called graphene are some of the most exciting areas of materials science right now. It is cool to see fly fishing getting into some of that. But the verdict on short nanotubes as Rajeff explained it was that they ran the risk of being more noise in the system than actual load-bearing or assisting structure, at least until they were grown longer. I have heard that this is the same reason some companies passed on this 3M silica material as presently available.
Zach
Guys –
I am sure those contracts are in place. I am also sure they are almost completely unenforceable. I’ve had several cases as an attorney involving products made overseas; those companies are impossible to hail into an American court because you can’t get service and they’re not subject to the local court’s jurisdiction anyway. The only recourse for a manufacturer who felt its designs were being stolen would be to quit doing business with the supplier, but as long as everyone stays relatively quiet about this kind of thing, it doesn’t hurt the American or European manufacturer if Brand X releases a surprisingly great rod that happens to spec out just like one of theirs.
Most fly rod sales are driven by marketing–both paper and salesperson. One of the major ways that rodmakers influence word of mouth is to adjust the margin the fly shops make on a given product. This happens a lot, and when one rod is suddenly more profitable for a local shop owner than another, that rod suddenly gets a lot more hype from local shop owners and guides, who are probably the single biggest factors in driving sales.
In addition to the logic above, I know for a fact that the out-the-back-door-intellectual-property-draft happens because I have spoken to many manufacturers off the record about what a problem this has become over the last 5 or 6 years.
In the specific case of Hardy, I can guarantee that they have their own particular blanks coming in because Hardy is one of the few companies that opted to use 3M’s Powerlux nano-particle, which Hardy markets as Sintrix. The same dust was offered to Sage, Scott, Loomis, St. Croix and everyone else in the carbon fiber industry, including things like golf shafts. Sage and Scott tested it and passed on it. Loomis used it. St. Croix used it for a while but it looks like they’ve stopped based on their current marketing. Hardy used it via their manufacturer, JS Co. I am not aware of JS Co. using that dust in any other product. Now as for Hardy’s *tapers*, I think the situation above probably applies, but in order to double-check you would need to buy competitor’s blanks and saw them into 1 inch increments and spec out the interior and exterior diameters to reconstruct the mandrels employed and the thickness of the flags wrapped around those mandrels at a given point (the only other factor in blank design is material used. Mandrel taper, number of turns of carbon fiber, and type of carbon fiber prepreg used are the three legs of the blank design stool). That’s the only way to know if Hardy’s or Loop’s or any other of JS Co.’s clients have had their particular exact taper re-used.
What I do know is that JS Co. rods offered well down-market are seriously awesome and those rods came out of nowhere (literally – first run ever). That tells me JS Co. is absolutely using its design expertise (if not the outright same taper) as developed for other companies to release “Brand X” rods which are the functional equivalent of the $700 Hardys and Loops, at bargain basement prices. That in turn should give you a good picture of what is going on with that $700 price tag in the first place.
Zach
The way most of this works, guys, and I’m speaking generically here, is that Company A decides it wants to get into the overseas rod business.
Now that company may or may not have its own rod designers. But there are designers and then there are “designers.” This happens a lot in fly fishing and not just with rods. Taking an example, someone here noted that Kelly Galloup “designed” the Clacka Craft Flypod drift boat.
That’s an awesome boat and I am sure Kelly was involved in pointing out the things he would like to have in it, like walk-over side storage. He probably was instrumental in knowing what the market wanted. But Kelly is not an engineer and I highly doubt he did any of the CAD rendering or any of the physical building of the molds which turned into that drift boat. He didn’t have to work with angles, check his math, etc.
The same thing goes for rods. A celebrity “designer” can have input into rod design that may be limited to saying, “I like a stiff tip section,” and then that “designer’s” name goes on the rod and the marketing. The celeb had nothing to do with the selection of prepreg resin, the type of carbon fiber used, whether or not to employ special nano-particles (which by the way are of debatable value in the first place), or the mathematics of taper design, which are very complicated and which vary between every single rod in the series.
JS Company designs rods. They provide completed designs to their customers for rebadging and they obviously sell some of their own line now. Their customers might be limited to saying, “We like this rod from this series and that rod from that series, please try to get close to those.” Or they might have an actual mathematician on board who can contribute in a meaningful way to the actual design process.
My sense is that fly rod companies are short on mathematicians. The American-made rod companies like Sage, Scott and Orvis have engineers on staff and they do math and modeling and things like that. Certain companies like TFO have an exclusive relationship with a single factory overseas. (TFO has its own design team who only design TFO rods–yes they are based in Korea, working with American feedback, but they aren’t sharing tapers out the back door to other brands). Redington is another example with its own design and manufacturing facility on mainland China.
But a great many “brands” you see are just re-badges of commercially available blanks and tapers. I have actually been approached myself about “designing” a line of rods, as have most of the bigger fly shops in this country. Some of those fly shops have gone ahead with house brands.
The issue with the JS Co. type model is you never know when your proprietary blank design is going to be built out all in black and offered to the next guy down the road. There’s a really good chance that if you used a micrometer on certain “competing” brands you’d find that they have the EXACT same taper for that reason. And in fact the rod companies do this themselves. (There is a reason Redington has its own facility–Sage doesn’t want to be back-door designing other companies’ rods for them).
The irony here is that the JS Co. type of rod quickly gets very very good because of the collective design team they have accidentally assembled. All these actual designers at different companies have input into the process and the end result is a great, albeit basic stick. One company introduced a brand new rod line a few years ago and I asked their product design manager how they had done so well right out of the box, with no designers on staff. He admitted the rods “came that way.” I’ve since had several friends buy them because I know they are a great deal – a “$700” rod for $200.
As far as all cheese being made from dairy, there is a hell of a difference between cheese and carbon fiber. 🙂
Zach
Hmm. Well, the same manufacturer made two of the top three blanks, so I guess the crowd has expressed their preference…
You can learn a lot on the internet if you know what to look for.