One of the most popular optional items of Maekawa craft rods is the reel seat filler. Some love the beautiful pattern of stacked bamboo, and some love stacked wood. Toshiyuki also makes landing nets along with bamboo rods. He uses stacked bamboo at their grips. Now you can find many reel seat fillers and landing nets that have the same stacked construction that Toshiyuki first started.
“I don’t care if other makers copied it. I would rather be proud of it because they thought it worthy of being copied.”
Even such a generous person had something left that he could not divulge. It was the process of varnishing. He has his own method to avoid dust and bubbles. It is easiest and simplest again, but all he could tell me was the fact that he is using two-part polyurethane resin both at the guide wrapping section and all over the blank. He does not brush. It sounded unusual to me because I do not know any other makers who use two-part polyurethane resin to varnish the whole rod surface. How does he catch up with the high curing rate of this resin? That is still a mystery to me.
*This article was extracted from “Mostly Bamboo” by courtesy of the author.