Despite the wide range of modern fishing rods ranging from durable synthetic polymers to even more durable synthetic polymers, all of them lightweight and cheap, some anglers do not have the heart to part with their old bamboo rods. After years of fishing, it is difficult to put them in the basement and forget about them, or, worse yet, throw them away. They would continue to maintain them and keep them “functional”, no matter how troublesome it is and how unwieldy they are.
Despite that, bamboo rods are far from durable. Their tips break off most often. What to do if that happens? And it’s bound to happen if you own an old-fashioned rod like that. Should you just accept that the rod is now shorter and continue using it? Of course not! It is easy to fix.
Get a durable steel wire and cut a two inch piece, now, you’ve got yourself a metal pin. Now, clean it and degrease it. Align it with the broken tip and lubricate the pin with glue, then put the pin inside. Wait for it to dry. Then, put some glue in the main part of the rod and press the broken ends of the rod to fit each other tightly. After complete drying, the surface of the rod should be covered with glue again and tightly tied with a thin nylon thread.
As you can see, restoring the broken tip of a bamboo rod is quite simple. But what if the whole rod breaks in the middle? This is a great reason to turn it a foldable one. To do this, you need to get a connecting tube of a suitable diameter from any strong metal and fix it on the thick (lower) part of the rod with glue. That’s all, now you can insert a thin end into the tube, and the former rod becomes an actual rod.
A tip: if the tip of the rod is too thin and fragile, it can be strengthened by soaking it in heated liner and wrapping it with a nylon thread. When it is dry, you will only have to cover the tip with a mix of acetone and glue evenly.
That said, why use bamboo rods? These days, you can choose any synthetic fishing rod out of hundreds. They are durable, they are easy to fix, they are predictable, and bamboo rods lack all of that. Sure, they are natural, but that is their only real advantage. Old and reliable does not yet mean automatically effective.
Perhaps, if your old bamboo rod is broken, recycling it would be a better idea than restoring it. You could make quite a few cool things out of it, all thanks to the fact it’s bamboo. Making a cool decoration out of a modern plastic rod sound less feasible.