A really enlightening historical account behind Winston bamboo which only increases my appreciation for Mr. Morgan's past and current work!
[I had to put his response in 2 different posts due to an apparent length restriction per post that the forum software has.]
Click here for Part 2/2. And to prevent splintering comments between the 2 posts, let's place comments here under Part 1.Hello forum,
Thank you for your kind comments about my involvement in Winston and complements about my rod designing ability and our present rods. I thought I would add some information about my tenure at Winston and my involvement in the bamboo rodmaking there. There is a substantial amount of confusion about my role which I would like to clear up. This is an abbreviated narrative. I have worked quite a bit on a book about my ownership of Winston and my fishing experiences I hope to finish someday.
Sid Eliason and I purchased Winston in early October 1973. I couldn’t believe I owned a company with such a great reputation among fly fishermen. I was in Heaven!
After two years I bought Sid’s share and was the sole owner. Several years later Glenn became a 10% owner.
You may doubt some of what I am going to tell you but it’s an important part of this narrative to understand what happened along the way. What I’m trying to tell is what happened to me without judgment of the people involved.
I started the long process of learning how to build bamboo rods under Doug Merrick. The first winter we sorted some 6 foot poles that were of very good quality. I don’t remember now where they came from.
When we started to cut strips the first winter I learned the taper patterns in the shop were worn out and there was no record of the tapers! I was dumbfounded! Gary Howells, who had worked at Winston from 1957 through about 1970, had started his own rod company. Doug had borrowed his tip taper pattern for us to use. Gary had designed the pattern with a notch in it so he could cut strips by himself. Doug didn’t realize this and set up the milling of strips with the roller in the notch. When we cut the strips, say at a 14 ferrule size, they immediately jumped to a 10 or 11. I don’t remember which. We then glued them up. Along with the tips we cut and glued butt strips too.
Gary would come over every Saturday morning and hang around the shop. I explained to Gary what had happened with his milling pattern. He just shook his head. He asked to see the butt sections we had glued. He pointed out the chips along the glue seams I had seen, which he said were the result of dull cutter blades. After Gary explained this I remembered when Doug was setting up the machine he had hit the anvil with the cutters while it was running. Then he asked if he could test the strength of the glue bond and I said ok. As he twisted each section it would pop and snap. The glue failed completely. I was speechless and felt my face flush with disappointment. All of the bamboo tips and butts Doug and I had cut and glued that year were junk! Gary explained that the Weldwood Plastic Resin glue Winston used at the time required temperatures above 70 degrees to cure correctly, and that the shop’s small furnace was not sufficient to warm the chill, damp air of a San Francisco winter. At Gary’s suggestion I later solved this problem by bedding the glued sections under an electric blanket until they cured.
I vowed then I would never let Doug help with the setting up of the milling machine or cutting strips. He never did.
I have always said to anyone who asked I really learned bamboo rodmaking from Gary along with what made a quality rod. I asked Gary to bring over one of his bamboo rods and compared it to one of Winston’s rods. The Winston wasn’t the winner. Gary’s varnish finish was gorgeous, whereas the Winston’s was very thin and spotty with lots of dust specks everywhere. His thread on the wraps looked alive, while the Winston wraps were the color of window putty. His ferrule fit was as smooth as butter, whereas the Winston’s was rough and catchy. Gary’s rod had a beautiful wood reel seat with highly polished aluminum fittings where the Winston had a black, Bakelite seat, and rough aluminum parts. I was shocked at the difference, and I ate a generous slice of humble pie. It was clear that I had a lot of work to do to bring the rods up to the highest standard. I determined to do whatever it took to bring Winston’s quality up to where it should be and make it a leader in the industry.
Fortunately for me, and then Glenn Brackett after he came to work in late 1974, Gary was a good friend and mentor to us learning to make quality bamboo rods. He was always helpful and really wanted to see us succeed. As you will see we were also helpful to him.
Gary introduced us to Al Talbot, a master machinist, who worked for Crown Zellerback, the large paper company. A number of years before Al had visited Winston and looked over the milling machine. Some time later Al invited Gary to his home shop and showed him the bamboo milling machine he had made. Gary was amazed. They became close friends and Al ended up building Gary a milling machine so he could start his own rod business.
Al was very friendly and helpful and wanted to help me bring Winston into the modern age with the proper equipment and techniques. The metal lathe and wood lathe were from the ‘30s, very much outdated, and worn out. Al suggested I purchase a small turret lathe for making ferrules and other parts. Fortunately I found a virtually new South Bend tool room turret lathe that used 5C collects listed in the paper. Al and I went to inspect it and I bought it on the spot. I didn’t know anything about machining but with Al’s and other’s help and my own intuition I learned how to use it.
The other suggestion Al made was that I should purchase a Sunnen honing machine to true the inside of the female ferrules. Al said just reaming ferrules, even running lubricant on them, didn’t provide a good, smooth interior finish. I contact the local Sunnen rep and he located a used one which I purchased. The tooling wasn’t complicated for the few sizes of ferrules we made so my learning how to use it didn’t take long. In addition to making the ferrules from Duronz bar stock I honed all of our ferrules until the middle ‘80s when Jeff Walker took over. After we moved to Montana I started using an outside hone to fit the males into sets of two males and one female. These ferrules were very light and the fit was extraordinarily good. Gary was making his ferrules too and I taught him how to use the hone which he did both in California and Montana.
The glue machine Lew Stoner invented was what Winston was using when I bought the company. It consisted of two counter-rotating wheels holding the thread which rotated around the rod blanks and had two thread bobbins to bind the blanks. Intuitively this machine wasn’t good for light sections like fly rod tips because at one point in the revolution both spools were pulling in the same direction. The tips came out looking like a corkscrew. Doug would slap them on a marble table and would get them very straight. I could never learn the technique.
Gary suggested that instead of using that machine I should build a modified Crompton machine illustrated in A.J. McLane’s Standard Fishing Encyclopedia. I drew up the plans for this machine and had a local machine shop make it. Overall the glue machine was standard except for the hardened steel fingers you could slide from side to side to change the angle the string wound on the blank. We would run the tips with the string wound closer than on the butts. In the beginning we had a simple bar and pulley using an endless string belt Al had woven for us with weight hanging below the bar. The amount of weight varied between the tips and butts. The woven belts were troublesome because after some use the belt would start to fray and catch under the wrapping string. The section would then have to be unwound, a new belt put on, and the section started over. I found some manufactured belts which were coated with rubber that lasted longer but were still a problem. I solved the problem by installing two twelve inch pulley wheels on a bottom arm where the string wound on one and off the other making it an endless belt. This completely solved the string breaking problem. The absolute worst section we ever got out of this binder was way better than the best I ever saw from the original machine.
The next big challenge for me was to improve the quality of the rod finish.
The balcony served as a crude spray shop, ineffectively ventilated by a varnish-encrusted exhaust fan I determined was an unbelievable fire hazard. An explosive mist clouded the entire workshop during spray operations. I had wondered why the surfaces in the shop were coated with a light frosting of varnish and this explained it. The wet rod sections were stood to dry in a small, heated room. Each section was held upright by tucking its tip into a ridge of corrugated cardboard attached to the wall. Rod sections, tacky with uncured varnish, would sometimes fall to the dusty floor, but would continue on through the production process. Doug never properly cleaned the spray gun between batches. Instead, he would simply dunk it in a can of lacquer thinner. The thinner caused the residual varnish to coagulate into globules that would coat the subsequent batch of sections in a skin akin to sandpaper. In addition to the globules, the blast from the obsolete, high-pressure spray gun dimpled the wet varnish, giving it the texture of orange peel.
It was obvious something had to be done with the varnishing process. In talking with Gary and others I knew I needed a regular spray booth with a good exhaust fan. I contacted the local Binks distributor to learn about spray equipment. They, too, told me I needed a regular closed spray booth with a good exhaust fan and a door and filters to trap dust from the incoming air. I knew I would never get a permit to install it on a wood floor so I just went ahead anyway. I cut a hole in the roof and installed the fan and exhaust vent above the roof. It occurred to me the tenants in the apartment nearby might complain about the varnish fumes but they never did. It was a much safer setup than the old arrangement and resulted in a tremendous improvement in quality. I bought a modern spray gun that used 18 pounds of air pressure, compared to 70 pounds for the old gun. In addition, the varnish was in a canister above the gun so it worked well with the lower pressure. Lower pressure and proper cleaning of the new gun eliminated the sandpaper and orange-peel effects, but dust was still a challenge. It took me a while to figure out how to get the dust off the rod sections before we sprayed them. Wiping was out because I couldn’t find a material that did not leave some lint. On Gary’s advice, I vacuumed the sections before taking them into the spray booth, and then blew them down with filtered air. That got rid of almost all of the dust.
When we moved to Montana and built an addition onto the shop I designed a special dust free room with a custom made spray booth made by a friend of mine in Illinois. I also wore an industrial clean suit with booties and a cap. In addition, I built in the room a round drum that rotated once a minute to attach the rods to so they wouldn’t develop sags in the varnish after spraying. I sprayed all the rods including repairs until the middle ‘80s when Jeff Walker took over.
Another critical factor in creating the best rods is the initial tempering of the raw bamboo. If you don’t heat-treat it the bamboo remains soft and will take a set just from normal use. Heat treatment stiffens the bamboo by gently cooking its lignin, the natural substance that provides structural strength to grasses and trees. High heat also colors the bamboo from pale yellow to dark honey. Lew Stoner believed in heating the bamboo only sparingly, and consequently Winston rods were lighter in color than those from other makers. Winston rods also had a reputation for permanently setting under the strain of a big fish or in just general fishing. I believe this was from inadequate heat treating.
Winston’s old bamboo oven was fired by six gas burners arrayed beneath its metal shell. Because each burner was adjusted separately, it was difficult to achieve even heat. Doug kept the temperature low to avoid hot spots that could scorch the bamboo. Gary Howells also used Winston’s oven for his bamboo heat treating. Gary and I thought about how we could improve its function. We decided if there was a baffle up about half way with a space on each end where the air could circulate in a loop with the help of a fan would provide much more even temperature. Fortunately the oven was big enough for me to climb in to mount the baffle. I then installed a fan fastened on the outside of the door for air circulation. The door would stay slightly open until moisture no longer would collect on a glass surface then the door would be shut. This didn’t completely cure the uneven heat but substantially improved it. We still had to reverse the batches end to end half way through heat treating. However, without the hot spots, we were able to increase the intensity of heat treatment, and the problem of permanent sets was significantly reduced or eliminated.