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A couple months ago my wife said she had found the perfect gift for me. She had arranged for me to take a bamboo fly rod making class.

Professional bamboo rod builder Harry Boyd has updated one of the most popular article series on this site, his articles on bamboo rod building from 2002-2004.

Follow along as Harry Boyd takes us through the process of trimming the bamboo blank to the proper length, preparing and mounting your ferrules, and adjusting the fit of the ferrules. Many thanks to Harry for this well received series of articles.

Now that we have our strips of bamboo tapered into sections for our fly rod, the next step is to glue these strips together into whole rod sections.

Harry Boyd teaches us the tools and techniques required to turn strips of bamboo into tapered sections of a fly rod in Part 5 of his continuing series.

Split cane: In the fourth installment of Harry Boyd's series on bulding bamboo fly rods, he describes the tools and processes of binding strips together and then heat-treating them in some sort of oven.

This is the third section of Harry Boyd's continuing bamboo rod course. Here we begin to mold the raw bamboo into something that approaches the shape and form of a fly rod, and the real fun begins. Read more in Part 3 - Staggering Nodes and Rough Planing.

Harry Boyd continues his series on the construction of bamboo fly rods with a look at selecting, preparing, and splitting your culms of tonkin bamboo.

Harry Boyd tells us "Since Hiram Leonard and the earliest days of fly fishing in our country, the allure of fine spilt bamboo rods has been part of the magic of our sport." Read Harry's introduction to his series of articles on building bamboo fly rods.

Surprisingly, in an otherwise literature rich sport, there have been few quality fly-rod-building books. The ones that come readily to mind are AMATEUR RODMAKING, by Perry D. Frazer in 1914, A MASTER'S GUIDE TO BUILDING A BAMBOO FLY ROD, by Everett Garrison in 1977. Thus, when a book on fly rod building is published, it is greedily snapped up. Usually, however, the new books turn out to be both poor in quality and short on useful information.