Nice, Dan!

The rod reminds me of a Granger Special, with the brown-red blank and lime green wraps. In fact, I recently thought about a future glass build to emulate a Granger Special's colors.

Doc and Boo, appreciate the kind words. Doc, funny you mention the Granger Special as I have several spools of original Rice's Granger green I've been saving. I was actually inspired by the old Pezon Michel glass.
Boo, regarding "E" glass I still have not gotten my prototypes to test yet. It's a long process. I won't know if the action I am looking for will suit me until I get them. But I have already thought about other "E" glass models to add.

Best,
Dan

Well Jeff, first off thank you for the kind words. As for the deluxe rods, in addition to the extra tipping, fancier reel seats, and handmade agate stripping guides here's the story.
When my first shipment of glass blanks arrived Allen and I took them out and inspected them. He put them together and started false casting them and he turned around with a certain look in his eyes that he gets when he's on to something and said to me "we can offer customers a hand tuned rod".
You see, when glass and graphite blanks are rolled and go through their oven stage funny things happen to them molecular wise. Some come out crooked, or they have other imperfections. But one thing they all have in common is they develop soft spots. It doesn't matter who rolled them, where they were rolled at, or what company made them etc. etc.
We took three of the same blanks dimension wise and they all had a soft spot in different areas. So ...
What Allen does is he eliminates these soft spots, which in turn smoothes out the action and makes for a better casting rod.
Now, one conclusion I came to is that it takes a very experienced rodmaker who's been making bamboo rods for a long time because after several thousand rods they can detect the slightest nuances in a rods taper.
So what does this all mean? Nothing really except that I wanted to offer something special to my customers that is different from other companies.

Best,
Dan

Well doc, this is one of those things I am not willing to discuss. If I may kindly suggest pose the question to maybe Mike McFarland, or one of the other builders/ finishers etc. on this forum and go from there. Sorry.
I will tell you that I have had some very experienced people cast my 8' 1" and it was hard for them to discern where the soft spots are but they are there. Again, it takes an extremely experienced hand to find them when casting.

Best,
Dan

I may be wrong but the only tuning I can imagine that can occur is spine related or moving the guides around a bit. It's not like you can change the orientation of the glass fibers ... Just a guess.

hey dan,
i sure like the look of your green wraps on the brown blank. and i just noticed that you're out of covington. i sure enjoyed the cedar river last year. keep up the good work.
-mike

Dan - I see in the classifieds that you're liquidating your glass blanks and won't be selling glass any longer. Were there simply not enough orders, or was it a supply chain problem? I know you had to switch glass blank providers once before. Just curious, as I thought your concept for this glass line was interesting.

I would give up the business before I gave up fly fishing.

Lugan, it's all about the same. But I have to say that the number of great customers outweighs the rest. Things of course have been skewered because of me losing my job and the current economy. At the beginning of the year I had a fairly large number of items in stock but after losing my job I needed to sell items to pay bills. Well, other folks were in the same boat and were looking for deals which eventually meant that something had to give. That something was me selling items for less than my dealer cost. So while money was coming in in reality I lost money. Fly fishing has always been a luxury, not a necessity.
I have been selling my remaining glass stock, reels that I wanted to keep for myself, and Herb Derr damascus knives but they have all been at a loss. I am not sure if I will continue to sell bamboo as a dealer needs money to buy stock from rodmakers. It's going to take a long time to build up finances again especially since it's going to take years to pay off my initial investment to open LCT.

Dan