Bamboo Rod Blanks
Bamboo rod blanks can be made ...on your own by yourself! It is quite important, I think, to get a closer look at a bamboo culm of the "Arundinaria Amabilis" species. You can see below a very close detail of a good quality bambo culm from China. Andy Royer took years to sort his kind of "quality" bamboo for us bamboo rodmakers. As a matter of fact, the Chinese peasants did not consider this "yellow", "old" bamboo worth of interest. For them, the "good" quality bamboo is the "green" bamboo, so Andy explained to us during the First European Bamboo Rodmakers Gathering.  Anyhow, the picture above shows as I said a good quality bamboo. The surface is "clean", there are no deep marks of "digging" insects, the colour is good, the bamboo looks straight and the nodes are at "normal" distance, i.e. not too close to each other (you can see this in the bamboo strip on the left-hand side obtained from the same culm; the short bamboo culm that you see in the middle of the picture is in fact the "left-over" material of a completed bamboo rod and can be considered good for fishing rod blanks only if you consider a particular way of making bamboo rods: the nodeless bamboo rod, made out of several shorter bamboo strips where the node has been eliminated - cut away literally!).  Below is instead a close sectional view of the bamboo culm where you can see the Power Fibers (the tiny dark "dots" within the "arch" of the plant)  And now a close look at a very "hot" bamboo fishing rod part: the node.
Gatti , the Italian company near Brescia (Lombardy, Italy) also sells bamboo rod blanks (next to its graphite fly rods and blanks) and components and it's also quite famous worldwide.  From bamboo rod blanks to Bamboo Rods Types
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