These are the detailed pages designed to accompany items on show at Fly Fest Scotland 2018.
Foster’s of Ashbourne, "Dovedale "
If you needed any more evidence of the reluctance to move forward in UK rod building, you need look no further than this rod that was actually being marketed in the 1920’s. UK rod makers seem to have carried an inherent mistrust of split cane from the outset. Both Foster’s and Hardy’s insisted on adding steel cores to their cane rods and Foster’s went one better in their 1892 patent for “diamond wrap” in which the entire rod is encased in a matrix of tightly wound wire. George Holden had advocated something similar in silk in his “Idyl of the Split Bamboo” of 1920, but Foster’s technique seems bizarre to us.