Boron rods

[ikeslayer]

hey whatever happened to these rods. i was reading an in-fisherman book and they refered to them. It sounded like they cost a mint but did they have their place or is graphite just that good? curious. ike

[thewalleyeguy]

Never heard of em

[Ralph Wiggum]

Heard of them but I've never seen them.

[Deitz Dittrich]

I bought one quite a few years ago... It was a very nice rod.. Boron , or at least the one I had, has a very slow action to it. It was an awesome jerkbait rod.

I broke it about 15 years ago, and did not replace it with another boron rod.

[Jackpine Rob]

I tied up 3 back in the early 80's, and they are very good rods. Mine are Fenwick blanks - 2 6'6" 2-piece rods and one is a one-piece 5'6" ultralight.

At the time they were the cat's meow - lightweight, fast actions and extremely crisp. I would compare the blanks themselves to the current Cabela's XML - which is what I have been using as I replace the beat-up boron rods.

The kick on boron was that it was brittle, and prone to breakage if you got even the tiniest knick on the rod. Personally I never had a problem, but talking to the Fenwick people when I couldn't find boron any more, they told me that they had to replace a lot of rods - and the stuff just wasn't working out as they had hoped.

Like all rod materials, there were a bunch of companies that came out with "boron" rods, but there were wide variations in the formulas used - just like buying a "graphite" rod today. I snagged a rod up on Basswood that turned out to be a boron Eagle Claw - blue in color with ceramic guides and sporting a Mitchell 300. After playing around with the rig, I gave the rod away and kept the reel. The action was mushy and the rod itself felt like a war club.

If you find one of the old Fenwick boron rods at a garage sale, snap it up. Even with the advances in tackle since the stuff first came out, boron still has application - it was ahead of its time.