Anyway, I want to talk a little bit about tapers. I'm thinking I'll post some tapers that I like here, but also talk about some of the intricacies of turning a published taper into a good rod. it's not always as easy as you would think ( or as easy as we rodmakers would want!)
Tonight: A Rose Is A Rose....
You can't be involved in bamboo rods for long without getting into a discussion of some of your "favorite" tapers. "I just love the Paul Young Para 15." "Me, i like the power of the Dickerson 8014." "you can't beat the Granger 8040!"
Notice that each of those tapers was referred to in the singular: "the", as in "the 8040". If only it were so easy. Going to rodmakers meets, I noticed that a rose wasn't a rose wasn't a rose. In other words, there were significant differences between different people's versions of "the" same taper. They didn't feel the same, they didn't cast the same, they didn't weigh the same... Yeah, some of it was due to differences in individuals' techniques - the glue used, different source of cane, different heat treatment, different grip and hardware... - but that didn't explain everything. You start asking guys to share the numbers upon which their rod was based, collect them, and compare them, you start to see what the problem is: many times, guys are using different sets of numbers as the basis for their build.
How can that be, you ask? Several possibilities:
- The original designer, say, Paul Young, designed a taper in 1946. He made rods with that name until late in the 60's. over the course of those 20-some years, he changed the taper a bit - to make it better, to meet market needs, to make a specific client happy... So if you are making or buying a Para 15, which of Young's versions are you getting? We call all of them "Para 15s"
- Something that often happens, I think, is what I'll call taper mutation. A maker finds/develops a taper he likes and makes a rod based on it. He probably doesn't hit his numbers all the way up and down the rod, to the thousandth of an inch which is what tapers are measured in. He may be off one or 2 thou here or there. Anybody who takes the time to carefully measure his rods and go back to compare them to his source taper knows that this is almost inevitable. He takes his rod to a gathering, and someone likes it. They whip out their calipers and measure the rod. They may miss the measurement by a thou or 2 here or there. They then go home and make their rod based on those numbers. They miss the target numbers by a couple thou here and there up and down the rod. As before, a couple thou off taper usually won't be noticeable, or change the characteristics of the rod. But say this process continues a couple more times. Take the 4th or 5th mutation and go back to the original taper and compare. At that point you can and will see differences big enough to change casting characteristics of a rod, maybe even change line-weight. But they all get called the same thing.
- If you measure an existing rod, that rod was usually covered with varnish. How thick is that varnish? You can't really scrape some of it off to know for sure (the owner tends not to appreciate that!), so you guess. if you guess too much, you will make a rod weaker than the original; if you guess too little, you will make a rod stronger than the original. Generally, people tend to guess somewhere around 4 thousandths for the varnish. When you consider that it's said that 6 thou in bamboo thickness can make the difference between a 4wt and a 5wt, you don't have much margin for error if you want to replicate an existing rod.
A couple years ago I organized a "taper comparison" at the Colorado Rodmakers Reunion. 5 different guys loaned us their version of the Dickerson 8013. i took all 5 rods, measured them, then we put them out on the rack for guys to cast and make notes on. The next day we compared notes. Almost everybody felt there were significant differences in casting characteristics between the 5 rods. The measurements I had taken verified significant differences in the source numbers. As an example, I think the tip measurement varied from 64 thou to 88 thou. When we compared taper sources, there were either 3 or 4 difference sets of numbers that had been used.
The most telling point of the exercise, I thought, was when i asked everybody this question: "Say you were buying an 8013 in a long-distance deal, where you couldn't cast the rod beforehand. Would you care which of these 5 rods arrived on your doorstep?" The resounding answer was YES! Different guys preferred different rods, but I think no one said "Naw, I'd be equally happy with any of them." (Well, OK, there are a few guys who don't like any version of the 8013; they couldn't have cared less which of the 5 they might get. That'll happen with any taper.)
So, the moral of the story? A rose isn't a rose isn't a rose, and one 8013 may not be the same as the next. The best way to know if ANY rod is good for you is to cast the darned thing. If you can't do that, but you happen to find someone who's judgment you trust, that can be second-best.
Here's my favorite taper for a Dickerson 8013. it's the 1949 version published by Jack Howell. Dickerson used the first 2 numbers of his model to designate the length (8ft0), and the next 2 (or 4) to designate the size of the ferrule(s) (in 64ths). Some time in the future I'll talk about ferrules and their interaction with the taper. For now, note that there is a 10 thou drop in bamboo size over the ferrule (about half a ferrule size), and that the ferrule is made to fit the tip snugly, and some bamboo on the butt must be removed (a 13/64ths ferrule has an inner diameter of .203).
1949 Dickerson 8013
MEASURED FROM BUTT UP Subtract for varnish Bare bamboo
Butt:
0 0.375 0.006 0.369
5 0.375 0.006 0.369
10 0.37 0.006 0.364
15 0.322 0.006 0.316
20 0.31 0.006 0.304
25 0.296 0.006 0.29
30 0.28 0.006 0.274
35 0.26 0.006 0.254
40 0.238 0.006 0.232
45 0.217 0.006 0.211
48 0.212 0.006 0.206
Tip:
0 0.202 0.004 0.198
5 0.198 0.004 0.194
10 0.183 0.004 0.179
15 0.172 0.004 0.168
20 0.16 0.004 0.156
25 0.145 0.004 0.141
30 0.128 0.004 0.124
35 0.112 0.004 0.108
40 0.092 0.004 0.088
45 0.074 0.004 0.07
48 0.066 0.004 0.062
Here's my all-time favorite 8013 I've made. It differs slightly from the above taper. (See what I mean about a Rose not Being a Rose...?) Later, I'll explain how and why.
A Rose is a Rose, Chapter 2.
OK, I mentioned that this rod above differs from the listed taper. Why is that? Well, because I was experimenting with hollowing rods then, and I thought then that if you hollow out a rod, you need to add a bit to its dimension, to make up for the "lost" bamboo in the center of the rod. So I modified the taper, making it bigger by about 2%, which was sort of the middle range of what i had been reading about hollowing.
As I've hollowed many more rods now, I've pretty much come to the conclusion that you don't really need to increase a rods dimension if you hollow it... depending on how you hollow it, of course.
There are lots of ways to hollow a rod. You can cut the apexes off the 6 triangles, all the way up and down the rod. You can scallop out the middle of the triangle, leaving more side wall area, for the glue to bond the rod together. You can cut off the apexes but leave dams every so often. If so, you can make the dams close together, or far apart. You can make the dams thick or thin. You can leave the wall thickness the same, or you can taper it as you go up the rod. You can hollow the butt only, or the butt and tip. You can make the walls very thin, then buttress them with more or larger dams. Or you can leave the walls thick and have few or no dams.
Each of these options, I think, can change how the finished rod behaves, compared to the others.
So you see, even with a simple word like "hollow" written on a rod, a rose is not a rose....
Here's how my hollowing looks:
This is a cut-off peg from a rod I made. You can see that I take the inner apexes off. You can't see in this photo that I leave dams supporting the structure, about every 4 inches. I do taper the wall thickness, thicker at the bottom and thinner farther up.. I don't leave a wall thickness of less than 60 thousandths. That means that when my taper gets down to a total dimension of 120 thou, I stop hollowing. Typically, that means that I hollow the butt and maybe the bottom third of the tip.
So, with this 8013 that I really liked, I hollowed it, and I added some dimension, about 2%. Interestingly, the rod still casts a 5wt, as does the solid version, but it's smoother, and seems to have a wider range of distances at which it's good with that line. Somehow, it also seemed to have more muscle, but it certainly wasn't a 6 wt.
There were some odd side-effects of the hollowing-and-expanding-dimension... For one, adding 2% pushed the ferrule station size up from a 13/64ths, to somewhere between a 13/64ths and a 14/64ths. I elected to put a 14/64th ferrule on it. So in spite of the fact that the rod is marked "D8013h", it really has a 14 ferrule on it. So why did I call it an 8013? Well, because that taper was the base taper for the rod. It's what I started with, and thematically, its style was still my target.
Another case where a Rose isn't a rose....
My conclusion: words and names (such as D8013h) are very simple concepts, compared to the multi-faceted ways a rod can get put together. They help us identify things, making communication easier, but they may not express the complexity of a rod.
If you're a fisher of bamboo rods contemplating a new rod, the best way to learn about a rod isn't to ask "what it is." The best way is to cast it. Knowing the "name" of a taper may be enough to "get you in the ballpark," in terms of what to expect, but it may not tell you what you really want to know, which is "Is this a great rod for me?"
If you're a rodmaker and you cast a rod you like, and you'd like to try to copy it, it may not be enough to ask for the taper numbers. It certainly won't be enough just to ask for "what taper it is." At the least, you might ask about hollowing if any (and how), about the glue used (haven't even touched on that yet), about any modifications made to the taper, and why, and about the size and style of ferrule used.
Final Chapter on roses
I'm going to finish up this subject with a comparison of a couple DIckersons - an 8013 (ca. 1949), an 8014 (ca. 1952), and an "8014 Hollow." All are 8ft long. the 8013 takes a 13/64ths ferrule, while the other 2 take 14/64ths ferrules. The 8013 is generally a 5wt, while the 8014 is commonly viewed to be a 6wt. (The 8014 Guide is often seen as a 7wt.)
Here's a chart showing the taper dimension for the 3 rods. At the left, we start with the butt, and then the chart lines fall as we progress to the right on the chart, and as the rod narrows as we move towards the tip. The gap in the lines represents the break at the ferrule.
The yellow line is the 8014, the magenta line is the 8013, and the dark blue line is the 8014 Hollow. You can see that the yellow line is above the magenta line, indicating that the 8014 is a thicker rod than is the 8013. Since it throws a 6 instead of a 5, you'd expect that.
So now let's look at the dark blue line. That's the 8014 Hollow. It's actually smaller than the 8013 at many points! Looking at the 3 colored lines, which 2 of the 3 rods would you most expect to resemble each other? The 2 that are labeled "8014" (yellow and blue), or the 2 that are most close to each other in terms of the dimensions of the rod (magenta and blue)? I know that I'd vote for the 2 lines that are closest together, i.e. the 8013 and the 8014 Hollow.
So what's going on? All three of these rods in question were pretty clearly made by Lyle Dickerson. Daryl Whitehead and Jack Howell measured the 8013 and the 8014, and have vouched for the provenance as well as their numbers. The 8014 Hollow, I measured with a group of rodmakers at the 2008 Colorado Rodmakers Reunion; the rod belongs to Jerry Stein, author of "the" book on Lyle Dickerson. i can assure the reader that our measurements were correct and that it was indeed a Dickerson.
For whatever reason, when he made the 8014 Hollow, Lyle Dickerson set the taper very closely to the 8013, with the exception of the area around the ferrule, where he beefed it up to be a 14 instead of a 13. Why he did that, and why he marked "Hollow" on the rod (he rarely did that), we'll never know. The obvious conclusion is that he hollowed this rod, and we can assume that was something unusual for him. (He also put intermediates on the rod. Again, unusual for him.) But why reduce the size of the rod in that case? Most of the time people talk about increasing the taper a bit if you are aggressively hollowing a rod. Why decrease it? We don't know.
Casting the 3 versions (not the originals, but copies), I can say that the 8014 hollow feels much more like an 8013 than it does an 8014 - it likes a DT5, and seems to love a WF6, but not a DT6 or WF7. Looking at the tapers, that's what you'd expect.So, once again, and for the last time here, when someone says they like "the 8014", what rod exactly do they mean? The 1952 8014 from The Lovely Reed that casts a DT6 or even WF7, depending on execution, or maybe the 8014 Hollow that takes a DT5 and is actually smaller at some points than the 8013? The only real way to know is to cast the rods.
I'll end with one last question: If the original designers of these rods didn't feel the need to make sure that every rod labeled a certain name be consistent from rod to rod, why should we expect that now, as we cast the increasingly rare originals, or the multitude of copies?
