about aefauld

I'm Pete.  I have been fly fishing since about 2009.   I have been fishing since I could walk.  I began making rods on carbon and glass blanks in 2018 after repairing several fly rods and realising that all that effort could go towards a new rod.   I built rods mainly on CTS blanks from NZ – excellent blanks which I fished all over the world and still enjoy fishing with occasionally.  One day, the idea of crafting bamboo rods entered my thoughts.  The opportunity to create a truly unique, natural and functional rod that could be tailored to suit the various environments I most often fished was intriguing to me.  I started reading.

I am a mechanical engineer.  My early career was spent designing, prototyping and manufacturing high precision optical and laser instruments.   I enjoy making things – not only the end result, but the tooling, jigs and fittings to enable the end result.  The tools, processes and equipment described as being involved with fabricating a bamboo fly rod, as well as the properties of bamboo as an engineering material, were fascinating to me, so I got started designing and making.

Almost a year later I had two bamboo fly rods, and everything I needed to make more.  I had never fished with bamboo before, so was keen to try them!  A few weeks were spent around the Snowy Mountains and New England region fishing.  The rods were both fantastic to fish with.  After another few months in the workshop and more tapers tried, more advice, more reading and refinement, a trip to New Zealand's Southland region afforded the opportunity to test the rods on some larger fish.  Again, the bamboo rod I was using was fantastic!  I kept making more rods...

The creation of fly rods is now a passion for me – an intrinsic part of my fishing life. Making rods offers endless possibilities, not only in how the rod looks and is finished, but in the experience of fishing with it.   I believe this is what attracts us to fly fishing – the endless possibilities it delivers us.   It is a sport of never-ending learning, discovery, wonder, practise and potential.  It is a lifelong passion for most of us, and rewarding beyond description. This is why there are so many thousands of different rods available to buy these days, I suspect.  As anglers we want to maximise the enjoyment of our time fishing, and one way to do that is to make it different by selecting a rod we think is uniquely adapted to what we will fish for, how we like to fish, or special, or new, or old … or whatever floats your boat!

However I have more rods now than I will ever need to use, and am not really a collector.   So, I am offering them for sale.   The prices reflect not only the significant investment in parts, tooling and machinery, but also the fifty or so hours of my time that goes into each hand made rod, and the fact that they are really quite lovely rods.   I hope you enjoy the pages here and please get in touch with any questions.