EclecticGuy

The manuscript for my book on reel making, The Reelsmith’s Primer is finally done! I will send a copy of it to my publisher, The Whitefish Press, tomorrow. I feel really good about it and learned a lot in the process. Early on, I created a reelsmithing community and used it to solicit ideas, provide feedback, and sanity check my writing and instructions. It was a huge success!

One of my goals for the book was to make it practical for … Continue Reading

I found this 19th century treadle lathe a couple of weeks ago. I finally got the leather drive belt material so I am ready to getit up and running. Although a lot of the plating is missing, mechanically the lathe is quite functional.

There are more photos here: Boley Treadle Lathe

You should see a Google Wave here. It is configured to be a public Wave so everyone can see it and post to it.

Testing complete so I REMOVED the embedded Wave.

Richard, one of my early reel customers and as it turns out, a neighbor, fished one of our local streams yesterday (Sunday). In fact, this is the stream that this reel model is named after – the Squannacook. Richard had a successful day and sent me two “family portraits” of his reel with a nice Rainbow and with the Prince Nymph he caught it on.

My second article in PowerFibers was a collaboration with Peter Dallman. It is our story on how we got started building reels and how I met Peter. It is in the newest issue but here is a copy of just the article: Its_Reely_Pretty_Easy_PowerFibers_Issue_37

This is good timing as my book “The Reelsmith’s Primer” is nearing completion!

The current issue can always be downloaded here: http://www.powerfibers.com/html/current_issue.html

Over the summer, my publisher, Todd, called me to tell me the great news that he had been asked to create a fishing exhibit for the Martin Van Buren National Historic Site. He immediately assembled his team of craftsmen to create this display of mid 19th century fishing equipment, I am one of them. Todd calls us the Van Buren Boys and there are 5 of us all together. The National Park Service has asked us to document our efforts so I have set up a blog for the group to use. The Van Buren Boys Blog will … Continue Reading

My publisher has a fantastic fishing/history blog – Fishing for History. Every Friday he posts a Video of the Week. This week’s music video is so funny and so good I just have to share it here! It can be found on YouTube too.

Cheers!

Over the last few years I have produced a number of fly fishing related items out of personal interest. Surprisingly, I get a fair number of inquiries to purchase these items – including tenkara flies, several other fly patterns, ice fishing tip-ups, hand-made brass fishing reels, horsehair fishing lines, Walton’s Engines (aka twisting or furling engines), and custom rods – all by … Continue Reading

I pre-ordered Snow Leopard from Apple to have it delivered first thing on its release date – August 28th, 2009! Apple came through, the package arrived by 10am and was waiting for me when I got home from work. The package is a single DVD installer. Simply insert the disk and double click the installer, it does the rest (no rebooting from the DVD). It took about 55 minutes start-to-finish to install on my 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo iMac with one automated reboot during the … Continue Reading

Well, I just finished my latest batch of Walton’s Twisting Engine and photographed them together. The one with the slender round handle is more traditional and the other with the big massive flat handle is more practical for actually furling lines and leaders.

It also looks like I’ll be writing an article for The Home Shop Machinist magazine on how to build these.