Thomas Rod Co. (The Journal S2-E1)

[Music] I've been making rods for 30 years now but at the time when I had an opportunity to buy the Thomas shop in 1999 I had been making rods for over 10 years at that point and especially in this area in Maine Thomas rods are kind of synonymous with bamboo rods and so that's what I grew up trying to emulate I guess you'd say when I was learning how to make rods you kind of have to start all the way back before Thomas really the majority of the major rod makers in the United States started in Bangor and Brewer most people don't even know that Hyrum Leonard who was considered the father of the modern bamboo fire rod was a gunsmith in Bangor and started making bamboo fly rods and in the 1870s he hired Fred Thomas as well as many other people but Fred Thomas was a shop foreman that Leonard Leonard ended up moving to Central Valley New York in the eighteen 1880s and Fred Thomas stayed with them for a few years ended up coming back home to Breuer which is where he was from and started out the Thomas shop right here in Brewer just a mile down the street here not even a mile from from where we're sitting right now he made rods and brewer until 1902 and then he moved the shop over to Exchange Street in Bangor the building is no longer there burnt down in a fire in the 20s and and then the majority of the years he spent on top of Park Street Hill up behind the City Hall in Bangor he built that building in 1923 and he was there till 1958 when when his son Leon Thomas retired and and sold the shop to Sam Carlson [Music] when bamboo started being introduced bamboos are very very strong it's a grass actually but it has the tensile strength of mild steel even though it's a natural natural product and Hiram Leonard was the one who designed the six stripped bamboo fly rod but they're essentially six pieces of bamboo all glued together if you were to cut one in half it'll look like a little pie with six 60-degree triangles and over the years people have done variations of that they've done five sided rods four sided rods even twelve strip rods which they built basically a rod inside a rod just to try to come up with their own thing but the six strip rod which is what Thomas made is kind of the standard more people made them that way than than any other but the Hiram Leonard was the one who perfected that and everybody that came after him not necessarily just the ones who worked for him most of them followed in his footsteps in making the rod the same way [Music] I've always liked the old version of things I like old cars and wooden canoes and in old fire roads and you know people ask me all the time are they better than a graphite rod and nope they're not they're both designed to catch fish and they both will and they do it a little differently they definitely have a different feel to them but if you like the tradition of course you know the old tradition of you look back on five fishing started out this way and people that like to try to get back to the old way of doing things like fly fishing in general this is definitely a feel to casting a bamboo fly rod that you don't get with modern technology [Music] I was making rods for you know 10 years before I bought the Thomas shop and I would make rods either just kind of developing my own tapers or making rods using tapers from different you know rod makers that I knew make good rods but when I bought the Thomas shop what I wanted to do was not cell reproduction rods but to try to reopen the shop and continue as if they had never closed so everything that I do I try to do with as much accuracy as I can to make the same rod they were making in 1958 when they closed the shop I use very much you know same glues same silks same varnish the same materials of course a lot of materials I'm using are the original materials with the bamboo but I use those same tapers a finish rod it looks very much like the same rods in the aesthetics of them the signature wraps and things like that so it's that's what I'm trying to do I want people to pick this rod up and go that's it you know and see it and say oh that's a Thomas yeah [Music]

Channel: The Journal

Views: 1,053

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Thomas Rod Co., thomas, rods, fly fishing, fly rods, fly tying, fishing, maine, boats, water, fish, bait

Id: pZk6Se3JZd4

Length: 7min 19sec (439 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 15 2018