Crossed splines

This is a photo of one of the things a rodmaker really hates to see: it’s a freshly-glued section that had 2 splines crossed. I pulled the binding string off and found the “surprise.” If a rodmaker catches the twist while the glue is still wet, you can take everything apart, clean the glue off, dry out the splines and glue it up again. If you miss it when the section comes off the binder, and the glue dries, well… we use strong glues for a reason, and sometimes it backfires… This usually happens on the tip sections, where the splines are tiny, and they can cross if you don’t pay attention. Usually I roll the glued-and-bound sections to straighten them out, and in that process, you can feel the “knot” where a spline has crossed (it’s happened to me one other time.) In this case, the section came off the binder so straight that I didn’t even roll it, I just hung it in the hot box.

If your section comes off the binder with a kink somewhere in it, there are plenty of methods published for straightening the blank while the glue is still wet. Run a printers rubber roller up and down the section, lay the section on a sheet of plate glass, put another on top of it and roll the section under the top glass, roll the section under your palms, starting at the center and working evenly out to each end, run the section through your fingers, applying pressure on the back of bends as they slide through your fingers, or even slapping the entire section down onto a sheet of glass. Whichever method you use, it’s worth trying to straighten the section, because if it glues up crooked, it will always want to creep back to that shape. Yeah, you can heat the dried section and straighten it, but that’s altering the bamboo, not the glue (for most glues), and the glue will always try to creep back to the shape it was in when it dried. (Others will disagree, but that’s my opinion.) But, whichever method you use to straighten a wet section, what you will all-too-often find is that manipulating the blank to get a bend out of one spot just produces another bend somewhere else on the section.

Having tried most all the above straightening techniques, I’ve concluded that the perfect way to get straight sections is to have them come out of the binder straight, and then do NOTHING to them until they dry. I use a JD Wagner binder, which is a modified Garrison design, where the section is “rolled” by a drive string, which applies a second binding string. My sections started coming off the binder straighter when I started using cradles to hold the section on each side of the binder. Before that, they flopped around on dowel pegs inserted into the front face of my workbench. The cradles are just a piece of 1-1/2 inch PVC pipe split lengthwise. I put tension on my sections as they dry to help encourage them to dry straight (see post below), because I am still in pursuit of perfect straightness.

As I said, if you don’t catch crossed splines when the glue is wet, well, the section is toast. So, I’ve actually made 3 tips for a recent rod as opposed to the regular 2. Moral of the story? Actually, there are 2: 1: There’s always a new way to screw up, and, 2: Even if your section glues up straight as an arrow (congratulations!), sight down it or lightly feel along it to check for crossed splines.

Lee