A Tour of the RL Nunley Rod Shop

Welcome to the R.L. Nunley Bamboo Rod Shop. The following are just a few pictures to give you an idea of what goes on in the day to day operation involved in building a fine cane fly rod.



Only the finest Tonkin Cane is used in the making of a quality fly rod.

This culm or pole is warehoused and dried until it is ready to be used to build a fly rod. To give you an idea of the size of this culm of bamboo, I wear a size 15 ring, so the bamboo, as you can see, is very large compared to most bamboo.

 

Here I am flaming a cane pole with a propane torch. I use 3 different flaming methods, depending on the end result I desire for a particular rod.


The pole is then split with a knife called a Bamboo Froe. I will split the pole into halves then quarters and work from there depending on my needs for the rod.

 

 

The next step is preparing the strips for the Saw Beveller. The edges must be clean and straight so that a proper cut can be made. The strips are sanded straight at the NODES ONLY! The area between the nodes must be left in tact so that the power fibers of the bamboo run in tact in the finished strip.

After the edges are good and straight at the nodes, then I use a die grinder to remove the internodal dams.  These are the pieces that separate the pole on the inside at each leaf node.

 

 

 

Once I have the dams flush on the inside of the pole, it's time to hit the bandsaw. The blade I use is a very thin kerf blade, so as not to waste any more of the strip than necessary.  You can see the small guide that I have clamped to the bed of the bandsaw. This guide insures that my strips are uniform width for the beveller and it also makes it easy for me to control the strips so that I insure that I'm cutting along the grain of the power fibers.


The beveller, pictured above, is a relatively complicated machine which cuts the tapered strips out of the straightened and prepared strips of bamboo. This is the machine that cuts all of my hex rods. You can see all of the fine bamboo dust on the machine. This Beveller has served me well.  It is built on the same principle as the H.L. Leonard Company’s Saw Beveller that made most of the Leonard Rods from the “Golden Era”. 



After I cut the strips to their final taper on the beveller, they need to be heat treated. In order to hold them in position and hold them tightly together while they are being heat treated, I run them through this machine called a Binder. Aptly named, the Binder "binds" the strips together with a glace cotton thread. The machine rotates the bundle of strips and wraps it with the thread at a predetermined tension.




Here is what the strips look like bound together and ready for the heat treating process.

 

After heat treating, the strips are glued then after curing, they're meticulously sanded and prepared for the mounting of hardware and finishing.

I make ALL of the hardware for my rods, except the guides. The reel seats, ferrules, handles, wood fillers are all made here in our shop. Soon, we plan to start making our own tip tops and stripper guides, then we'll investigate the feasability of making our own snake guides.

If you have any questions about my rods, or my rod making process, feel free to email at the link below or call me at

479-414-6470

[ email R.L. Nunley ]

Updated August 26th, 2007