Cut The Craft Podcast

And so I found an engraver in Atlanta, and I went down and met with him. And I started learning about that. And because I'm a hands on guy, I started getting intrigued with that whole deal too.

And so I talked to him and asked him if he could do it. And he said that he thought he could. And we talked about how that would work if he was going to do it for us.

But I told him from that very first meeting that I'm a hands on kind of guy. And I said, I got to tell you, have you ever considered teaching anybody?

Because as cool as I think this is, I'd really love to learn to do it myself.

And he scoffed and said, not just anybody can learn to hand engrave. And I was like, well, all right, I won't tell you what I actually said in my mind, but so.

What is like too that saying that to someone automatically means, and you're not one of those people?

Oh, yeah. And he had just met me that he had no idea what I could or couldn't do. It was just the idea that because it, no one else can.

Right, right.

Don't even try, which was just like the bamboo rods were when I got in bed. It's just like, you know, don't even think about trying. It's too complicated, too hard.

I can do it. You cannot. It's a strange attitude, but so, of course, being a competitive kind of guy, that registered as a challenge in my mind.

I don't know where that guy's at these days. I don't ever hear about him, but...

That's really funny.

But I worked with him for a while for a couple of years, but he didn't know anything about fly rods.

So I would say there's some big event coming up that this rod is the big gift for, and the rod's been done for weeks, and I'm waiting on the engraving and the dates getting closer and closer. I'm like, where's my hardware?

And then I would get it like the day before, and it's upside down. And I ran into that enough times. I can't stake my reputation on someone else's work like this.

And so I say I either have to just take it completely off the menu, or I've got to bring it in-house, and although college, I started out at Georgia Tech Aerospace Engineering, University of Florida with English Literature and Philosophy, and then University of Georgia with Education, and then Studio Art, but Studio Art was my final major, and this is where I should have been all along. That was my natural fit. I just seemed like a way to make money, it turns out I was right, but it was the most helpful thing that I studied, and so I was like, you know, I can draw and stuff, and I know I can make things, so I'm just going to take a chance on myself, and I just decided right then I would never, and I had a whole bunch of engraving orders on the books, and I was like, I'm never sending another penny out on that.

I'm going to figure out how to do it. So I went to engraving school in Kansas out at GRS and took the intro class there, not knowing because you could be good at one form of art and terrible at another, you know, you never know what your natural abilities, because I was kind of a sketcher, you know, and engraving is very smooth line oriented.

You also knew that only a certain type of person can be an engraver.

Yeah, not just anybody, which had me, which had me a little nervous right off the bat, you know, I had heard so.

But no, I went out there and then I went back every summer until I'd studied everything until they started asking me what the heck I was doing there. And then they made me an instructor out there. So, so I went and got professional help to learn to engrave.

But because I had the orders already, as soon as I could get competent enough to satisfy, at least myself, I had plenty of work and because I brought it in house and I could talk directly to the customers and I could encourage them on one direction or the other and show them things and discuss, all of a sudden that offering just went through the roof and now I engrave at least 60 hours a week, I'd say, on average.

Geez. Well, and so, I mean, this also has gone from being a bamboo fly rod side hobby to, I mean, now you'll have like a storefront and front of the house people and you have another person, Riley, who's making most of the rods at this point, right? And then you're mostly doing engraving.

We've got half a dozen people now pretty well. So yeah, when it was just me and like I thought, you know, you just get these orders and get these prices, you have to work and you got it made. And I did the math on it and I was like, you know, still can't hit a middle class income, you know, doing this.

If you think of all the business expenses associated, you know, there's a lot to running a business. So we had to start thinking a little more business, realize we need to become a rod company and not just a guy. And that's when I quit signing the rods myself and we put our logo on it.

I also don't want it to end when I'm ready to retire. I don't want my life's work to just end, you know, I want to build something that continues.

And so yeah, I've got two guys, Riley and Dean is also full time with us and they do most of the bamboo work itself.

Unless we're in like a bind, we need to catch up on something. For the most part, they do most of the planing and that sort of stuff that doesn't really change. You know, you have to plane it, you have to heat it and stuff that I've done a thousand times and I'm the only one that does the engraving.

So they can do the engraving in the house here.

So I've got to spend most of my time on that. And then my wife and her assistant, Cassie, they do all the real work, you know, all of the emails, the business, the sales tax forms, the marketing, the scheduling with clients and paperwork, all that kind of stuff.

But yeah, we've got our storefront now, we've got our school where we teach and the production and the retail showroom and the inn upstairs. So it's turned into quite a little, quite a little fiasco.

So you mentioned that there were challenges with starting to learn, like people were just like, oh, you can't, there's no way you'll be able to figure this out. It's only for people like myself.

And now you're teaching people, what's going on there?

Well, I think a lot of the old traditional crafts, and I don't know if you've seen it, there was such a master and apprentice kind of way of thinking, the way it used to be handed down. One of my engraving teachers, when I was learning, would tell me how, when he would work in his original studio, anytime you went in the room where the main engraver worked, he would take his apron and cover all of his work and his tools, and he would just sit until you left the room. It wouldn't even work if there was another person in the same room.

Even if they weren't interested in engraving, that was your livelihood, and the idea was that you protect it and it only goes to who you say it goes to, and that would be like one person who just then continues after you. And this kind of attitude seemed to get handed down with some of these traditional crafts. And so with the rods, when I first started, first off, I couldn't find anybody.

I went to Atlanta. There's a big fly shop there that's been around a long, long time, and they kind of know everybody in the scene. And I said, you know, anybody that knows anything about making traditional bamboo rods.

And he was like, oh, yeah, you guys go see, you know, old Jerry there. And I got his phone number and I called him and he's like, yeah, come on out to the shop. I go out there.

He'd made about a quarter of the way into the process and then had given up as far as he'd made it. He's like, oh, but you should talk to Ted, you know. So I go to his house and Ted had made it halfway into the process before he'd given up.

I never found a single person who had actually completed it. And then, so I just decided, you know what? It may be the worst looking, worst casting rod ever, but I'm going to complete the darn thing.

I'm not going to be another half rod wonder.

So I found every old book, some very big and some rather helpful, some small and completely unhelpful. Some were 100 years old, some were newer, and it seemed like most of them were kind of written more from the standpoint of, this is how much I know more than you can do it, sort of an aspect. But, so I read all of them twice, literally before I got up the nerve to order some bamboo.

And then I just reread step one from every book.

And then I would, I like what this guy's saying. I have no idea what that guy's saying.

I don't understand what this person's saying. I would try it. And then I would just work my way through it.

So my method was always based on results and not following any one person's exact routine.

Because now, as long as I've been doing it now, I can see that there's a lot of nonsense in some of these things. A lot of these books were written, the reason they were so willing to share is because they weren't actual full time professional.

You know what I mean? They were trying to get themselves exposed to become that. But so, they didn't, a lot of the guys writing didn't know, a lot of the guys that knew weren't talking.

So, but it's been super helpful with the classes because I struggled through every possible method.

You tried all the scenarios.

Yeah, I tried and failed at every possible way you could. So when in the classes, when they said, what about this or what about that? Or they screw something up.

I know exactly how to steer things back on course there.

Yeah. Well, so, so you, there are, you're not the only person making bamboo fly rods in, right?

Correct.

And so how, how did those people, was there any kind of like, oh no, Bill's like, you know, opening up the can of worms or like blew the lid off the secret or whatever, the secrets out, you know, like, are people, was there sort of like a kickback from that within the broader community of bamboo fly rod makers when you, when you were in the school?

I would say so. Even when I was getting into it as a younger guy, it was such, it was such a small niche that it was kind of like, you know, you had your hardcore core group of guys with some, some lineage or connection to the old school guys and they were all just trying to kind of control that flow. So when they saw me just kind of coming out of nowhere and they didn't, they didn't really care for that.

In fact, I got, I always remember another good challenging comments I got was when that article, original article came out, I got a couple of weeks later, I got a letter in the mail from Canada and it was a rod maker up there, a professional rod maker who just like ripping the article apart and telling me how all this was wrong and I can't actually do this and I can't actually do that. And I still get some of that today. I've had, I'll get just every once in a while, I'll just get some nasty, it's the crazy thing.

It's the craziest thing that and so early and then I went to a big fly fishing show up at Somerset, New Jersey and this is I'm still in my 20s, getting it going and there are all these guys that I'd read about there and stuff who are now like 80 years old and I was so excited to meet all these guys and they wouldn't give me the time of day. They all just huddled in the corner and whispered amongst themselves and scowled in my direction and that's when I was like, you know what? I'm not going to waste my time trying to make inroads with those guys.

I'm going straight to the people and I'm going to become those guys on my own. And it's been so much better this way and we've been so much more vastly successful because it's your customers that tell you what they want, not your competitors. The competitors are there to keep you in your place.

They told me once I started one of the classes and the class has resulted because nobody would help me, so when we go to shows or whatever and people would come up to me, random strangers, they'd say, what kind of varnish do you use? You know, the only thing I knew to say was like, oh, I can't, it's proprietary, you know, and I tried that like once or twice and I was like, man, that feels not great. I don't know if I can be one of those guys.

And so there's got to be a better way to do this. So the class thing just kind of developed naturally for with interest people. Once I knew people started asking me.

And so the classes just started to slowly evolve.

And yeah, then the other odd makers were like, you're going to put us all out of business in two years, in two years, we'll all be out of business.

But of course, if anything, it's just generated a renaissance of interest because it was dying out.

It was going away. You know, and there were guys doing it, there were guys picking at it. I think there was a guy doing a class where you'd make like the main, the shaft of the rod.

And he did like a handful of guys a year, or running 168 guys a year through here making a complete rod from start to finish. Geez. And all those guys are going home and spreading that enthusiasm.

You know, we're booking two-year solid out now just as fast as we can go. And there was not that kind of enthusiasm didn't exist before. The market didn't.

If it was just me telling everybody how great, and me and those old crusty guys, how great fly rods were, everybody would think rightly that we're just serving our own interests, you know. But when their neighbor and fishing buddy comes back and is like, look at this awesome thing I made. He's got nothing to gain from it.

And he's just enthusiastic and happy, you know, and that kind of enthusiasm is what really sells, not an advertisement in a magazine, you know. So it's really, it's done the exact opposite. It's just made the pie bigger for everybody to share.

Yeah, that's awesome.

It is really nice. I think it's one of those things where it's like, you know, being terrified of like, competition or like losing every, you know, that kind of stuff just doesn't work. It just doesn't work.

Like you're sort of creating your own problem.

Like why not just have people be happy and excited about what you're making?

Right. Exactly. You have to just keep your eyes on why you're, you know, you have to do your thing and move forward.

That's the way I found it. Coming from a bike racer, I'm going to race with 200 guys. I lost just about all of those races.

Only one guy wins out of those 200. And it's rarely me.

So it doesn't matter. You can't think like that. You just go for the ride.

You do your best and you push forward and you can't even listen to it. I don't even listen to my own press like if I'm on a TV show. I don't even watch it.

I can't. I just stay focused on what I'm doing. I don't look at competitors.

I have no idea what they're doing unless someone else tells me. Because it doesn't matter because I'm just pushing myself forward as fast as I can all the time. Yeah.

It only slows you down to look behind you, you know what I mean? You got to keep your eyes forward.

Culture shows rituals and outward manifestations of home. Home points to heritage. Heritage lives within and breathes with you.

Heritage can find you even if you've forgotten.

Like you'll overhear from our next guest's experiences. He weaves baskets of yesterday, baskets holding history.

I remember it like it was yesterday, he recalls of some childhood escapades. But in saying so, he brings yesterday into today. Sweetgrass baskets incorporate bull rush.

Bull rush isn't even botanically bull rush, technically. But another word for the cattail plant.

In other words, words point to origins.

I was on a hike this weekend and saw some variant of the cattail, which kids on TikTok can be seen biting into like their hot dogs lately because they explode and unfurl. Though it was a swamp and not a marsh, it felt familiar enough and I felt at home. Being from Charleston, South Carolina, where The Notebook was filmed, the Civil War started, and marsh grasses hiss in the humidity when the wind kisses by.

I can't tell you about our next guest without including some of my own heritage because he and I were, to borrow his phrasing, born into the same place. They say home is where the heart is, but let's not fall for that cliché. Our hearts are in our chests and if yours ain't, I don't know how you're listening.

But a slow ticking clock in a quiet room can make me feel at home because it reminds me of my Mimi's old house in Hanahan. Or I can conjure the smell of the Lowcountry by concentrating on a memory of pluff mud at low tide. Corey Austin mentions weaving sweetgrass baskets at the Charleston City Market.

I remember sweating there every other Saturday when my other grandmother, my Mimaw, would take me. Seeing people making tightly wound baskets out of what looked like thick straw to me at the time. Baskets, which Corey tells the intergenerational and cultural history of through his making of and his explanation of their symbolism.

Basket weaving is a public speaking expressing the identity of Charleston, but even more so the Gullah Geechee people. Since their part in Charleston involves bringing their craft abilities with them when they were forced there through enslavement. Working under threat of death and making things worth more than money so cash crops could cash in.

The more you think about something, the more that something lives in your mind, takes up space in your brain and is given real consideration.

Sometimes conversation causes conversation.

Corey mentions a Waffle House close to his heart off of Longpoint Road.

Brian and I essentially cemented our friendship in during some deep late night talks over some smothered and covered hash browns. Other times conversation causes contemplation. Next episode, Corey Austin is here to remind us, the pauses are real.

We've talked about this a little bit on the show before, but I mean, Bill was talking about sort of that with like the trade secrets of bamboo fly rod making and even a little bit with engraving too.

But and I think we've talked about this before, but like in the book world, it's totally open. You could email the most like famous book binder in the world and then they would just email you back and you realized it was just like someone in their garage or something like that.

And then let you know whatever you were trying to figure out or at least point you in the right direction. And so do you feel like in the wood world, is it a mixed bag?

Well, I've never really encountered anyone who said like, oh no, that's like proprietary information. I can't tell you that. But I also have to say that I'm often too shy to ask questions, which is kind of.

Ridiculous because now I'm asking people questions every Monday.

But I think I've just been kind of like, that's just not my personality. I usually just want to figure it out myself or just don't even think to ask the question. I sort of like bumbled my way around into knowing what I'm doing.

But I do know as far as teaching goes, I've not really taken classes, but I've taught some wood carving classes with like, you know, teaching people how to make a spoon out of just from a log, you know, with a with an axe and the hand tools and stuff. Right. And from what I understand, a lot of people weren't teaching how to use the axe, and they would just come with like a blank, like a spoon blank, and teach people how to carve.

And if anyone asks questions, it'd be like, you know, they would just say, oh, it's, it's so hard, you wouldn't be able to do it, but that's just kind of, that's just kind of hearsay. I've not actually encountered that myself just because I was like, well, why wouldn't I know how to, you know, you just start and figure it out. I've never, I never asked anybody.

I just started doing it.

Right.

Before you knew you couldn't.

Yeah, yeah. Before someone said, oh, no, you have to be, you know, at least you have to start working with an axe when you're seven in order to know how to do this.

Just like the cyclist, it's either, it's two tracks. You can either start working with the axe or start riding a bike professionally.

Yeah, it's a, it's a strange thing. I think I got more resistance, well, early on, because nowadays with the internet, if you want to know how to do just about anything I do, get on YouTube. It's pretty much all right.

Like there's no secrets in the world anymore. You know, you want to know what the president's thinking, read his tweets, you know. So it, but before, previous to that seems like it was a little trickier to find information and things.

But then also, I think I had more of a, more blowback once I began to achieve success at what I was doing, because you get a lot of guys want to do, as strange as it is, within this little niche, there's a lot of guys who would like to do this as a career. Because it's a cool thing. And if you got online and said, I want to buy a custom bamboo fly rod, for example, you'll find probably hundreds of websites of guys saying their professional rod makers want to sell you a rod.

And of those hundreds of websites, there's literally just a very small handful, I mean, like a half a dozen, maybe in the world, that guys actually pay their mortgage doing this, you know, and all the rest of them are wishing that they could, you know, but it's so hard. It's hard. If I had to put the same amount of time and energy into working at McDonald's, I'd live in a mansion now.

Exactly.

Wow, I got a good one.

There's our sound bite for this interview.

So that gets kind of weird with those guys. But there's also a scene, but I don't want to make it sound like it's the whole community is that way, because it's not, because it's also a very big scene of enthusiasts and hobby guys. They have gatherings where they get together and they share information and things like this.

And there's a very big enthusiast scene like that.

But yeah, so it's not really those guys that are any issue. And a lot of our guys have gone on and make rods.

We have guys that come and take our classes and then pop up those websites and sell rods. And that's a wonderful thing, because like I said, we can't do it all. We can't create the market all on our own.

We need all those guys. And for those guys, it's great too, because they sell just enough to kind of maintain their hobby and feels good to make something and sell it. And most of them are retired from some actual job anyway, so it all works out.

But there are a lot of giving guys that will share their time and energy. And then there's guys that are just in it for the self-promotion.

For the immense wealth that can be had.

Yes, the immense wealth and fame that often come from bamboo fly rod making.

Well, I do think too that it's such an important lesson to learn that when you are more open, it only benefits yourself as well. I feel like that's sort of the general theme I'm picking up on from this conversation. If you come across as open and nice and willing to share what you know and things like that, then those people learn.

And even if they in some way become a quote unquote competitor or like a colleague or something, they're still going to have a good opinion of you, you know? And that seems to be a nice thing about it. It just sort of like, you know, creates a nice sense of camaraderie amongst the people.

Absolutely. And my idea with that, as far as people talking about competitors or anything like that, is the guys that you have to earn yourself from being a competitor or whatever, they don't need you. You know what I mean?

Like, I got to where I'm at with no class, nobody teaching me anything, nobody helping me, and I still got here. Anybody who's going to be my competition would also get here with or without me. You know what I mean?

So, I might as well be the guy that taught the guy that replaced me, than the guy that just was a jerk to him and got replaced by him. Like you said, at least they'll say nice things about you.

So I'm going to sort of shift the conversation here a little bit. So, I was reading on your website, you talk about the action of fishing, like the response to another living thing and why that's important to you. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Well, I think it's me, but it's fishermen in general.

The interesting thing about it is, it seems to be something that everybody can enjoy it to some degree. I think, you know, if you took somebody with no interest and they were on vacation and they stuck it, all of a sudden they felt a living thing tugging on the other.

You would get that moment of electricity. And for someone who, like myself, who is just a fisherman, it's just something that's primal and is just in you, for lack of a better word, is nobody in my family liked to fish at all. It's not like I was raised and taught this and it was kind of ingrained in me to appreciate this.

Like they all thought I was nuts, but I was like, I was like eight years old and I would just get my stuff and I would walk down the road to the pond, who knows who owned it, it was down the street and I would just sit there and fish all day, you know. And I would put the fish in a bucket, carry them home, show everybody, walk them all the way back and then dump them back in the pond.

That's so cute.

And I literally remember the first time I was ever taken fishing and I don't remember the fishing. I don't remember if I caught anything. I don't even know if I went alive, but I remember looking in the water and seeing them, just like looking in the water as like three years old and seeing these living things under there and just wanting a closer look at them.

I was like, I must possess that. So what it is nowadays and with a lot of people that carry it on, it's participating in nature. You're not just going and observing it, which is amazing as well.

You go and you go camping and you look at the beautiful views and it does good things for your soul. But if you go and you actually interact with living things in nature, and the nice thing about fly fishing is there's a very big conservation ethos, it's a very big catch and release. I haven't kept a fish in 25 years probably, and I've caught a lot of fish in those times.

And it's not that I'm anti-hunter for the guys who are hunting and eating, because if you eat meat that was raised at an age, at least the animal had a fighting chance if you hunted it and eat it. But I don't need that fish to eat. You know, I can have my bean burrito and be just as happy.

So the joy in it for me is the pursuit and the catching or the trying to catch that interaction. So I don't know, there's something about your primal urges that are satisfied by getting out there and participating actively in the nature. I mean, to catch food is something that's just in our genetic code, I believe.

And you get to satisfy it this way, but without damaging the resource, you know, we try to take very good care of the animals because we appreciate them so much. And it's just a special way to participate in nature.

So I think you touched on this a little bit, like the history of bamboo fly rods. Like, what were people, you said that the fly rods that you make were basically kind of like invented in the United States in like the 1850s or 60s. And so like, well, what were people using before?

Kind of like, how did people catch fish before 1850?

Nets?

Now, of course, there was fishing goes back and fly fishing goes back a long ways, depending on exactly how you define fly fishing. They could go back as far as Egyptian times, where they're using official insects. But most people think of bamboo fly rods, exporting guys, they'll think of the old English chalk screens and the guys and their tweeds and kind of the stuffy, pretentious kind of thing.

But over in Europe, before the 1850s, the rods were made of wood. They were yew wood, greenheart, lance wood, any flexible, strong type of wood, anything they would make bows out of, anything they would make, marine lumber, they could withstand that was potentially they'd make it fishing rod of some sort. And what happened was the English had at one point used like a little chute of bamboo on the end of their wooden rod, just because they noticed how lively and springy it was.

And it was a good job of protecting the leader of your line so it didn't break if you caught a big fish.

And the rod started getting shorter and lighter.

And what they realized is the best part of the whole rod is that little chute of bamboo out on the end.

So then they wanted to make the whole thing out of bamboo. But then like I said, they'd have to in some way be able to control the action of it, because it's not just a uniform, flexing thing. You want to be stiffer here and softer there, and it has to perfectly unroll that line as efficiently as possible.

So they had to use multiple pieces of it. And it went through a lot of trial and error and different configurations. But the bamboo fly rod, as anglers think of it these days, was first appeared in about 1846 in the United States.

And shortly after 1850, the Leonard Rod Company, Industrial Revolution, they actually had machines where they could, didn't even have to hand plane them, they could run them through these giant routers, so to speak, and blades and cut them into, even if it was a little crude by modern standards or handmade standards, but they could bang them out by the thousands. And that really solidified it as the way that they would be made now. And it did such a better job than the older wooden rods, such more lively, such greater tensile strength.

And then the Hardy Company from England ordered one from the Leonard Rod Company and reverse engineered it. And then they started producing them in England, Pesson Michel in France, and it spread to Europe in that way. But yeah, it originated here in the United States.

So for such a young country, we can't lay claim to a lot of traditional crafts, but that's one of them, the split bamboo fly rod. Wow.

So interesting. I always wanted to be a really good fly fisherwoman. And it just escapes me.

I try so hard. I need someone to teach me how to do it.

Professional help.

Yeah, I need professional help for sure.

You have to come visit the shop sometime.

This next question I have. I'm excited to ask you because sometimes we get craftspeople who've done, like came out of school, whatever, you know, learning that they had and went straight into their craft and that's all they've done forever, which is totally fine. But so what about making bamboo fly rods and engraving satisfies something you wouldn't get from another career?

And what are some of the challenges?

For me, it was, I think I alluded to earlier, it was like the money of other careers to work, just so that you could do something in your off time that you were interested in. It just didn't work for me. I tried, I gave it a solid effort and just couldn't do it.

I was terrible at anything that I didn't care about, you know. So I didn't really have much of a choice, you know. So I had to find a way to make a living at something I did care about.

So what it satisfies for me versus the career that just makes a living for me was that need to make something. Like I mentioned earlier, when we built a house, I by general contracted a house and I watched all these people work on the thing and all I did was make phone calls and threaten people if they don't meet timelines. I got no satisfaction from that no matter what the paycheck was, but I swept the floor and I felt good.

And I was like, look at that. Look how good that looks. That is a good floor sweeping job.

So for me, I needed to make a thing. And I think that's one reason why our classes are so popular and so many people come back time and time again. Because they can go their whole career and never have anything tangible to show for it, other than a pile of cash.

But they have a lot of that, but they realize that when they're gone, there's nothing tangible remaining from their career.

You know, so I think they're so amazed when they realized they actually made a thing. They started with a raw material and they turned it into something functional and usable and beautiful.

And I think for most people, whether they know it or not, it's a very satisfying thing to do.

And it's more and more, it used to be that that was a very common thing to do. These days, it's very rare to take it for a person to take a raw material and make something functional out of it.

So what would you say some of the challenges are that you've had to overcome as you've made these different transitions and stuff like that?

The challenge for me, or say somebody wanted to get into doing what I do, the problem is, or any passion job, is if it seems like it'd be a really cool, fun thing to do, that means there's a lot of people who would love to do that thing. And when there are people that do it as a hobby, that means people like doing that thing so much they'll do it for free. How do you, as they make a business out of something that other people will do for no money?

How are you going to pay a mortgage that? And the answer I've found is that you have to do it on such a high level that only you can operate at. You have to do it on a professional level.

But that is the challenge. A lot of people think, you know, I'm going to start, they'll tell me they come to the class, I'm going to start a business, I'm going to make 100 grand a year is all I need.

And then I'm just going to go fishing the rest of the time and I'm like, okay.

But the problem is as soon as it doesn't feel that same fun and excitement, then they're like, that's when they'll quit. And what they don't realize is that's when the business parts, that's where you start to get paid when it will sometimes it will have to feel like a job. You may not feel like getting up and pushing a block plane all day or cutting metal, but you have to do it anyway.

And you've got a show coming the next week. It's four o'clock in the morning, you're not done. Your hobby guys will be asleep and you've got to push through.

You don't have a choice. And so that's kind of the challenge. It's the same with like the bike racing thing.

There's a lot of guys who wouldn't like to ride a bicycle all day every day, right? That sounds like a great time if you can pay for doing that. But you have to work even harder to make, if you want to do it as a career, you have to work even harder at things that seem enjoyable and fun because so many people would also love to do that thing.

And it's the ones that can actually put in that extra work and realize that even if it feels like work sometimes, all jobs are going to feel like work sometimes, might as well. For me, I would rather do something that I'm passionate about, even if it's extremely hard. I'd rather work 80 hours a week.

I had a class a couple of weeks ago where we had a lot of custom engraving, they wanted a lot of extras. Shannon, my wife, kept track of the hours, which I try never to do. I was in the workshop 108 hours and six days.

And I'm almost 50 years old. I would rather do what I do at that level than work at the post office 40 hours a week and make the same amount of money. I mean, I would still, because I've got driven by that passion, and that's just where I fit.

That's my comfort level. That's where I would prefer to be.

It's interesting. I really like how you were talking about kind of like, you know, earlier on when you were thinking about it, you're like, well, I don't want to ruin a perfectly good hobby. And then now you've definitely like, you know, blasted by with like a turbo engine past that line of like turning that hobby into like a tiny empire.

And so, but that's really cool, though, that it's like, it kind of still, it can feel like a job sometimes or like a chore sometimes, but there's still, it definitely sounds like you still really enjoy the challenge of these different, the different tasks.

And there's also like a nice variety built in. I mean, it's not, sometimes it's teaching, sometimes it's engraving, sometimes it's bamboo fly rod, sometimes it's all three at the same time.

And so it's kind of nice because you never really get bored. Like there's always something a little different to do if you are getting really tired of something.

Absolutely. If I was just on the basic production rod, just that same thing over and over and over and over again, you know, now it's just a regular old job. I might as well do something that makes more money and go fishing, you know.

But it is nice that we have the classes, we'll have a week long class, we have the enthusiasm of all these new people coming in, you meet new people. There's a lot of them are doing it for the first time and you remember the excitement and how cool what you're doing actually is, you know, it can become old hat if it's, but then you realize, you see it through a first timer's eyes and it reminds you how lucky you are to get to do what you do. And then when they've about exhausted you at the end of that week, then you get there, put on your headphones, stare through the scope, do some, you know, quiet engraving work and think in your own head for a little bit.

And when you're tired of that tedium, I can go over and plane some bamboo.

So it is set up for longevity. You know what I mean? You have to think about things like that.

You got to watch out for burnout. You got to make sure that you keep yourself engaged and enthused about what you do as well. Sure.

Yeah. So who is there someone inside of a rod like bamboo rod making that you admire or like a type of person, and then maybe someone outside of your craft?

I think in the bamboo rod making really for me, the most inspiring people to me are, it sounds weird, but on one level, it's our students because it's the guys that want to do it because this is where I was. They want to do it and will actually pony up and go for it and actually jump into it. It's not so much other rod makers that do what I do or whatever.

I'm not impressed by myself or what I do because this is what I do. And if someone else is doing what I do, well, obviously, that's a thing. But the most impressive is when guys go for nothing.

The hardest part of that is that first step of the journey. You know what I mean? And that's why I appreciate that most of those guys that just based on their passion and enthusiasm will commit to go down that road because the guys are nervous.

People come from around the world and they spend a week with us here and they don't know what they're getting themselves into. And we have so many people that say they want to do it, but the guys that actually show up, you know, those are the impressive ones to me. And everybody who shows up, we're going to make sure that they get there.

So it's not any much so in the industry side of it, but more just the people of it and the enthusiasm because that's the only reason I started this. It was not a business idea. It was just that it's all I wanted to do and I also have to eat, you know, discovered that early on.

And then the real heroes of the industry, the real people that I couldn't do without are like my wife Shannon, who does all the actual work, Cassie.

And because there's so much behind the scenes stuff that allows me to do the fun stuff, you know, and be the hero that has all the cool info that people want or makes the cool thing. But meanwhile, I've got an old crew of people back there working and busting their butts to make sure, you know, if, you know, about once a year, Shannon quits on us, and I start to go up to Home Depot and start putting my applications because I could not do, I couldn't do it alone, you know, there's just no way.

Yeah.

So those, they're the real heroes of this industry is all the behind the scenes people, but, you know, for this little micro industry that there is, but any business, you know, that when you get into the minutia, it's amazing that any small business can survive whatever it is that you do with all the, with all the taxes and red tape and things that you've got to deal with, the insurances. I mean, it's ridiculous. So it's not as just pleasant as pushing a block plane a little bit and somebody hands you some cash and you go fishing, you know.

Yeah.

Yeah. So outside of making rods and engraving, what else are you interested in and why?

I like anything that challenges me and has a lot to learn. So I've been a sailor for a long time, and I love that because it's fly fishing and there's way more efficient ways to get that job done. There's a really ancient, difficult, complicated, potentially dangerous way to do it.

Yeah, that's the one for me. It's things that have some sense of nuance about them. From my cycling days, I've always been a two-wheel guy, so I enjoy motorcycles as well and traveling.

I've done some traveling that way, and I like the old classics and have had a number of those, and riding on the racetrack, because there's so many technical things to learn and to work on, so much gear to fuss with, and completely impractical sort of thing to do in regular life, so it makes it a perfect hobby.

Yeah, I love how much impracticality plays in your interest.

Yeah, right. Yeah, if it makes sense, I'm not really interested in it typically.

Oh, that's so good. Bill, if someone wants to see more of your work, where can they find you?

The best way is, well, if you could come and see us here in Blue Ridge would be the best way you can talk to us in person. We've got our little shop right on East Main Street here, where it's a little tourist town. We've got the scenic passenger train, all the little shops and restaurants.

It's a neat little town in Appalachian Hills up here in North Georgia. Lots of good fishing, but you can also see us on our website at oysterbamboo.com.

Awesome.

Right on. Sweet. Well, Bill, thank you so much for giving us your whole morning and sharing, you know, your story starting at the, you know, from tobacco farms to metal engraving.

You're very welcome.

Yeah, thank you so much.