This is a cultural thing for me.

My grandparents were immigrants and small farmers. They succeeded when many did not. In their time they moved from working with horse drawn equipment to tractors and pickup trucks, from hard physical labor to mechanized farming. My father’s father reinvented himself from subsistence farmer, to blacksmith, to well driller over his working lifetime. My grandparents had no money for extras, but they wanted good tools that would make their lives easier. My grandparents made many of their tools.

In my father’s generation the men were blue collar craftsmen, farmers and laborers. They were practical and inventive people. They borrowed from the new technology, bought what they had to and built what they could, adopting a practical and economical course. I was taught that good tools and good equipment are important, and homemade stuff, built just for the purpose, is best.

I have several graphite rods, all assembled by me from blanks. I sold or gave away the ones that didn’t appeal to me.

I have about a dozen cane rods. A few are excellent in every way. The rest are sound, serviceable fishing tools. I didn’t pay retail for any of them. Four were made by professional or accomplished amateur rod makers. The others were used rods produced by local hobbyist makers, and I restored or remodeled them, or I put them together by matching parts of different broken or distressed rods.

I have high praise for those who can make a good blank from the culm. I have never invested in the equipment or the time to do it myself.

Good cane blanks are easy to form into something that will work, when they are finished they are beautiful, and they are relatively easy to repair. With graphite blanks, you can only do so much. With graphite, the factory determines what the rod will be like. If you want something different, you buy a different rod, and if you break it, you send it in or throw it away.

From gstrand’s post: “But does a bamboo rod catch fish better than a contemporary graphite rod?” My cane rods are chosen or tailored for my needs for my trout fishing in Midwestern small and medium sized streams. I couldn’t find graphite rods to do the same work as well and as economically.

I have also made a number of wood rods. These are cheap, effective, and nice looking. I split my stream fishing between the cane and wood rods. I use graphites in the fall when I fish ponds and small lakes.

There are a lot of good graphite rods, and I have no quarrel with those who favor them. But I was taught that it’s better to make my own stuff, inexpensively, tailored to the purpose. And cane (and wood) does this better for me than graphite.