A story of an opportunity squandered: decades ago I ffished with a good friend who since passed away. We would usually meet up at New York City Anglers Club
outings, and usually he would have a new Tim Bedford. Tim B was a student of Dickerson's and moved to the Bay Area from MI, and he was very very
innovative.
My initial goal with my buddy was to use him as a on-location resource for trouting in New Zealand - he had been going for 3 month jaunts every year since before Fly Fisherman Magazine began (and the infamous article about NZ customs confiscating the flies of the prof from Utah who was there for a month-long trip of a life time*). What I wanted was someone to tap me into the best 4 weeks of a season to hop on the plane and who could show me around.
But as the years went by, our friendship delved into the arcanae of fly rod design. He was a math whiz, and his work was government classified - I think he was a CIA or NSA quant. He was a big user of the computer systems prior to the PC and Apple, and naturally we thought in terms of utilizing a little of the taxpayers resources to a higher end than only calculating ways of blowing up people.
I myself am a trained engineer , but my career never led me down the path of actually doing it - nothing techies hate more than a wannabee engineer running their programs, but I'm actually a nice guy. So all that training had to find an outlet, and the design of fly rods is NOT the simple beam model in physics that layfolk might think. The pilgrimages to a bunch of rod shops and factories made my business trips more tolerable, but conversations on a higher technical plane with the folks at the couple Winston location, designers and owners of plastic rod companies, and the usual suspects among the top and not-so-top tiers of the cane world (unfortunately some no longer living) put a centrality into ffishing a few hundred and casting a few thousand wands of one substrate or another.
When my buddy died, his widow offered me his computer disks of all the rod calculations he had conducted with Bedford. And like a fool, I declined - and have since lost track of her. We always discussed tapers, but it wasn't till a year after his death that the revelation hit me like a thunderbolt. His calculations went beyond beam or beam resonance calculations - they must have focused on what you couldn't see, but what I could feel: the internal geometry of the hollowing tapers.
As many hollowers know, there are just a few major modes of hollow building construction, and one has to take more than the usual account of ferrule design and placement. But the hard thing to pre-calculate is the geometry of the hollowing - notice that the good builders don't ever talk much about that?
tl
les
PS * the NZ fly confiscation turned out semi-ok: the UT prof told me his son was in the customs line right behind him and heard the goings-on. So he declared his gear to be 'lures' and not 'flies'. Ah - how semantics sometimes does tell the tale....
PPS - all my kids have gotten random technical degrees - it's a house requirement of growing up. But I'm placing my hopes on my daughter - she just got her PhD, also at MIT. And she's been developing contacts on various aspects of
theories.
My initial goal with my buddy was to use him as a on-location resource for trouting in New Zealand - he had been going for 3 month jaunts every year since before Fly Fisherman Magazine began (and the infamous article about NZ customs confiscating the flies of the prof from Utah who was there for a month-long trip of a life time*). What I wanted was someone to tap me into the best 4 weeks of a season to hop on the plane and who could show me around.
But as the years went by, our friendship delved into the arcanae of fly rod design. He was a math whiz, and his work was government classified - I think he was a CIA or NSA quant. He was a big user of the computer systems prior to the PC and Apple, and naturally we thought in terms of utilizing a little of the taxpayers resources to a higher end than only calculating ways of blowing up people.
I myself am a trained engineer , but my career never led me down the path of actually doing it - nothing techies hate more than a wannabee engineer running their programs, but I'm actually a nice guy. So all that training had to find an outlet, and the design of fly rods is NOT the simple beam model in physics that layfolk might think. The pilgrimages to a bunch of rod shops and factories made my business trips more tolerable, but conversations on a higher technical plane with the folks at the couple Winston location, designers and owners of plastic rod companies, and the usual suspects among the top and not-so-top tiers of the cane world (unfortunately some no longer living) put a centrality into ffishing a few hundred and casting a few thousand wands of one substrate or another.
When my buddy died, his widow offered me his computer disks of all the rod calculations he had conducted with Bedford. And like a fool, I declined - and have since lost track of her. We always discussed tapers, but it wasn't till a year after his death that the revelation hit me like a thunderbolt. His calculations went beyond beam or beam resonance calculations - they must have focused on what you couldn't see, but what I could feel: the internal geometry of the hollowing tapers.
As many hollowers know, there are just a few major modes of hollow building construction, and one has to take more than the usual account of ferrule design and placement. But the hard thing to pre-calculate is the geometry of the hollowing - notice that the good builders don't ever talk much about that?
tl
les
PS * the NZ fly confiscation turned out semi-ok: the UT prof told me his son was in the customs line right behind him and heard the goings-on. So he declared his gear to be 'lures' and not 'flies'. Ah - how semantics sometimes does tell the tale....
PPS - all my kids have gotten random technical degrees - it's a house requirement of growing up. But I'm placing my hopes on my daughter - she just got her PhD, also at MIT. And she's been developing contacts on various aspects of
theories.
