Update: Thursday, April 23, 2009

In this blog: Rough Planing

The first few weeks of open-water bluegill fishing are typically some of the most challenging for me. The bite is often just as light as it was through the ice, but open water means the end of the spring-bobber and the beginning of nymphing. So I fix my gaze on the end of my 4wt floating line and look for subtle cues – Set the hook on the invisible strike!

It just so happened that the start of open-water fishing in the spring of ’09 corresponded with my first attempts at rough planing bamboo strips. The similarities were unmistakable – even if the strikes were not. Like nymph fishing for bluegill at ice out, I found the greatest challenge in rough planing to be recognizing those near-invisible cues that tell you how to tilt the plane, where to take off a few more thousands of an inch, or when to stop. The planing forms, screw gauge, and dial calipers are helpful, but ultimately insufficient. It’s more than science. It’s art.

When a 360 degree culm of bamboo is split into 24 roughly equal strips, the results are uneven angles slightly shy of 90 degrees. These rectangular(ish) strips are then laid in a maker’s 1st Forms, which have a v-groove cut down the center to hold the strips for rough planing. One side of the v-groove is cut at 30 degrees. The other side is cut at 52.5 degrees. The resulting overall angle of the groove is 82.5 degrees and corresponds to the angles in the strips – slightly shy of 90 degrees.

If you look at the bottom face of the forms pictured below, you can clearly see this 82.5 degree angle.



In theory, each strip should fit neatly into the v-groove of the 1st Forms. The enamel side would be pressed up against the 30 degree side and one of the freshly split faces would be pressed up against the 52.5 degree side. The fit would be tight and perfect, and the other freshly split face would be planed off, creating the first 60 degree angle between the enamel face and the newly planed face. After this, the strip would be moved to the maker’s 2nd Forms, which also have a v-groove cut down the center, but this time both sides of the v-groove are an equal 30 degrees – 60 degrees when measured together. The enamel face and the freshly planed face would be seated in the v-groove and the unplanned face would be planed off. The result would be three faces with the exact same width and three angles that all measure 60 degrees – a perfect equilateral triangle.

However, as you can guess from my introduction, there is a HUGE gap between theory and practice. You see, the strips don’t fit the 1st Forms perfectly, so the resulting first angle is not a perfect 60 degrees, nor is it perfectly uniform. Because of this, the strips don’t fit the 2nd Forms perfectly. Once they are planed in the 2nd Form, the resulting three angles are not perfect 60 degree angles, nor are they perfectly uniform.

To correct these imperfections, the maker closely and painstakingly checks and measures every inch of every face of every strip. He may find three or four inches of a strip here and there that are 40 or 50 or 60 thousands of an inch fat. He is also likely to find three or four inches of the same strip on another face or another portion of the strip that are dangerously close to being too thin. Of course fat or thin spots on the faces of the strips mean resulting angles that are greater or less than 60 degrees. The maker planes more bamboo off the fat spots, tries to avoid the thin spots, tilts his plane to the right or to the left in the spots that have angles greater or less than 60 degrees, checks and measures and rechecks and re-measures, and more than anything, tries to become a bamboo artist.

So, that’s how I spent my early mornings and late nights during the ice-out season of 2009. In the end, I think I was markedly slower and more perfectionistic than needed. It took me approximately one hour to rough plane each strip. But then one night, I was finally finished. Eighteen strips had been planed – not perfectly but close enough, and better at the end than in the beginning. The butt strips and both sets of tip strips were fitted together and hand bound first with masking tape and then with 16-gauge-cotton thread, ready for heat treating. The whole of my first go 'round with rough planing was very enjoyable - there is just something about curling off a long smooth shaving of bamboo. And the end product has me hopeful that a successful first rod is within reason.





To celebrate completion of this stage, I slipped out the following day for a little ice-out bluegill nymphing, but that was finished too. Instead of a tiny cue and a finesse hook set, a bass put a bend in the cane of my Southbend Tonka Prince before I could even set the hook. Things are about to heat up.



Next time: building bamboo ovens and experiments in heat treating.