No. 071 - A wading staff...and a bank staff...and a landing net.

This one presented a bit of a challenge!

Chris had bought several of my sticks to add to his collection over a period. Then a few months back he suggested I might like to work on a project he had been considering for some time. Chris enjoys a bit of trout fishing and had a hankering for a custom-made combination landing net, wading staff and bank staff. The net itself would be Carrilon's "Bamboo River Net", a very elegant and lightweight piece of tackle. (For any anglers among you, Carrilon have a Website at http://www.carrilon.co.uk ). The obvious material for the job would have been bamboo, but I had no experience at all with this material and wasn't keen to start the learning process with such a major undertaking. I suggested Chris should try a rod-maker.

Then a month or so later, a friend in Wales told me he had some pieces of yew stowed away from his longbow-making days. Chris's project sprung to mind, and it turned out my friend also knew of a woodturner who would be able to turn the various sections to my requirements. It looked as though we had a runner. Chris agreed and we struck a deal.

It should have been quite simple: all I had to do was to design the bits and pieces, pass the drawings and bits of wood to the turner and fit the bits together when he'd finished. Well, designs were designed, drawings were passed on and a trip to Wales was arranged to fit in with our Easter holidays. But at this point everything fell apart. The wood was all splitting and the woodturner wasn't at all inclined to do the work anyway. It was sharp-intake-of breath time and mutterings about "It'll take me two days to set up the lathe to do that, you know. And then there's templates to be made and...no, I really don't want do that".

This left me with a bit of a problem - but as it happened a day or two later, back on home territory, I bumped into a fellow stickmaker who had obtained a number of billets of superb maple wood, originally intended for making woodwind instruments. I bought a couple of pieces, enough to do the job twice over if need be, and set about finding a woodturner locally. I drew a blank and eventually made the decision to do the work myself, by hand. This would need some changes to the design and a bit of experimentation, but I reckoned it could be done.

Chris was extraordinarily patient while I messed about with bits of wood and various types of screw joints. We got there in the end though, and here are the results:

	On the left I am holding the landing net/wading staff combination. On the right is the bank staff set-up with antler handle.

Above are two shots of the constituent parts. From left to right:

1. Wading staff bottom section, 23mm diameter. This is tipped with antler and has a length of heavy brass rod inserted to prevent the bottom end trying to float away.
2. Bank staff bottom end, 23mm diameter, for use when fishing from the bankside. Fitted with an Alpine spike .
3. Top section, tapering from 25mm at the top down to 23mm. This can be used on its own as a 24 inch extension to the net handle, or screwed onto either base section.
4. Antler handle, for use with either staff when the net is not required. This is capped with sapele mahogany and black buffalo horn. The base is also of buffalo horn. The wood was impregnated with epoxy resin, for waterproofing.
5. The net itself. A short length of 25mm diameter maple was formed into an adaptor between the flat oval cross-section of the original net handle and the round cross-section of the extension handle.

The various maple sections were all cut from one billet of 3 inch square cross-section, and worked by hand to a round cross-section using planes, scrapers, abrasives and some simple guides of my own design. As an indication of the accuracy of this method, the karanda collars have an internal diameter of 20mm. Their outside diameter is 23mm, so the wall thickness is just 1.5mm and they have to be pretty accurately concentric with the brass joint and the maple shank.

The staff handle is made from red deer antler. A 20mm dowel was inserted through the antler and buffalo horn base for strength and to take the 12mm brass screw connector fitting.
Making the joint between the round shank and the broader, flattened, net handle was never going to be easy. I settled for grafting a short adaptor section onto the handle by means of a long tapered (scarf) joint. This had to be cut and aligned purely by eye as there were no straight lines to serve as a reference. Then I blended the shapes together in all three dimensions to produce this rather complex-looking shape. For this joint I used a polyurethane resin glue for maximum strength and resilience.
The net handle had a final surprise in store for me when I hit the hidden panel pins, presumably inserted to hold the inner lamination of bamboo strip while the bonding glue set. Extracting these left us with holes in either side of the net handle. I was looking for a suitable attachment point for a lanyard at about this point, so I drilled right through the handle and inserted a piece of small brass tube. A length of leather thong will be threaded through here. I did the same near the top of the next section to provide another attachment point for use with the staff configurations.
SOLD (a commissioned work)

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