Hi Guys


In common with many of you I have to scour the rod supply industry looking for exceptable grade cork shives. My suppliers I use just two, try extreemly hard and are very honest with what they get supplied and I sometimes have to wait months for product.

Now what I just can't understand is the cork that is availble to custom builders is in many cases a lot more inferior to that being fitted to relativly low cost manufacterd rods coming from the far east. OK in some instances the rods can cost as much as $440 but often $150 rods have pretty decent cork on them.

Now the best cork I can get from the USA costs me $2.50 for a half inch shive (Further Graded by Supplier) By the time I have imported it I have to charge $8.80 for a linear inch of cork handle. No labour at all at this point. A twenty inch float rod handle comes in at an unbeleivable price of $176 materials only. You can actually buy a pretty decent float rod for that kind of money over here. Quite often a cork handle made from these shives is no better and in many cases worse than what can be found on these imports.

On most of the spinning rods I do the cork is more expensive than the blank. This to me is nuts.

I have tried buying cork in the UK but it makes you weep just looking at it let alone attempting to make it into anything .

Has the Chinese Rod building Industry cornered all if not most of the best available cork. Ok it is way bigger then the Custom build market which has approx 330,000 custom builders in the States but If each builder only purchased 10 shives each that is still 3.3 million pieces and one would have hoped that a company in Portugal could see the oppoprtunity and come out with some decent stuff.

Whats your view on this. For me it is the single most biggest headache in producing quality product.

Regards
mike O



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/24/2005 03:53PM by Tom Kirkman.

I hope your thread will somehow uncover the mystery of quality cork. I would like to contribute a small piece to the puzzle - on the import cheapos with the good looking cork grips! I have been admiring the cork on Wally World $ 15 casting rods for almost a year and trying to figure out a way to get the same quality for my custom rods. Last week a guy comes wagging a Pro Tecnic Ultra Gen 3 All Graphite Helium Loaded 17.3 M made in Korea wonder stick into my shop for replacement of a guide and tip. The cork was gouged and much to my surprise I discovered some sort of foam grip that was wrapped with the prettiest immitation cork tape on the planet! In the world of today What You See Ain't What You Got! I have a sample of this stuff and will post a picture latter today!

Gon Fishn



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/24/2005 02:28PM by Bill Stevens.

They just figured out a way to get around the high price of cork.
Did they tell the owner he was getting a quality " cork " handle??

Bill,

Yes take the point. not all the stuff you see is genuine cork but you can always tell. by sight and touch. Cork is a very unique material, but it should not bemore expensive than a high quality blank. If you were cynical you might say it could not be cork it's too good. Seriuosly though this is a frustrating situation. Most of us have customers who insist on cork and have no real understanding of the difficulties of obtaining the product and when you quote them prices well most go ballistic. If there was a single reason for me to give up on Flaot rods and fly sticks then the availablility of even reasonable cork at sensible prices would be it.

I think a lot of the better looking cork rings, preformed handles and the like are not natural cork but are made form granulated cork . I use to carve decoys using cork blocks that had been made from granulated cork and most, if not all, cork tile is made from granulated cork.

I've never seen good quality cork fitted to any commercially made rod. I have seen poor cork, carefully and well filled so that it looked like much better cork.

Good cork, rod maker's scale CG1 is available, but most dealers don't or won't stock it. It's expensive. CG2 should be relatively easy to find.

...............

Tom,

I am still looking. I need to check with my suppliers to see if they are using this scale. Fact is even the $2.50 shives are still not that good. I discard up to 30%. I also have to say that I have seen very good cork on manufactured rods that have been imported from China and there was not that much filler used. Sure I have also seen plenty even high priced rods that were not pretty in this regard. But still my fundamental question remains why can't we get good quality cork at reasonable pricing. Do you consider $175 dollars as reasonable Tom for a twenty inch cork handle. Even in the US it would be $100. I personally don't, and certainly many European customers do not. Whats the attitude of American rod buyers when faced with a cost like that. I do not bury nasties in my pricing as I believe in transparancy.
Just trying to make sense of the cork supply sitaution.


Tight Lines

Mike O.

For what I know the best cork is first bought out by the Shampagne brewing industry and we are just about the very last in the line to get the good stuff - if there are any left. I think that this was the case round the Millenium when even the best of commercially made high end rods started having pretty crappy grips due to low availability of CG1 cork. Hopefully the alcohol industry will start using more of the plastic bottle tops. ;)

The wine industry is using less and less cork each year. They've moved to composite corks which they feel are better for their product. No way they ever bought as much cork as rod companies did and if you really look at real cork wine stoppers, they're not all that great quality wise. Not those I've seen at least.

I have seen good cork and it doesn't cost $175 for a 20 inch handle. Check with Golden Witch. They often have cork that would match the CG-1 grade. Also remember that there is no such things as perfect cork. It's a natural product and most all rings will have some lines, pits or slots in it.

Ken
.50 thick rings A plus $2.50 What's the difference?

Something to think about: instead of throwing away those "junk" cork rings, why not use them fill them a little and use Tom's flocking idea? I haven't gotten the chance to do it but it seems like a very good looking and viable choice. A lot of custom rod makers have now gone to useing a lot of different woods in their grips also. For what's it's worth!!

Bill in WV

Mikko,
Lets all pray that the entire alcohol industry DOESN'T move to plastic caps. I'm not too sure that a cork grower, loosing his biggest buyers, in fact an entire industry, wouldn't look at tearing out those cork trees and planting olives or something that can turn a profit. It turns out that plastic corks are cheaper and don't taint the product like cork can. Cork for wine is already a thing of the past for major producers. Fewer producers of cork will mean higher prices for an increasingly rare item and (maybe) lower quality. Think I should review that article on flocking...

Tim

I once saw a documentary on the cork producers in Portugal, this may explain why the cork is so rare and expensive but i agree,

The trees that the portuguese harvest from are well over 100 years old, and if i remember right, take at least that long to grow before you can harvest them and it's a once off harvest ,after that the tree is dead..
The reason wine and champagne bottlers are moving to plastic or rubber is to offset some of the demand/hurt on the cork tree's.
The trees are also extremely sensitive to the environment , things such as global warming and el-nino (? the weather phenonomon), not to mention, 100 years ago Portugal's population and infrastructure wasn't creating any problems to cork trees. Imagine people are encroaching on the farms boundaries for general living, with that comes the ill effects humans can have on such fragile environments and plants such as cork trees.
Portugal also has the perfect climate for cork, the plant has trouble growing anywhere else in the world.
I know here in Perth, Western Australia, we have world class wine producing areas, some farmers are trying to grow cork to help with the bottling, but so far the quality in the last 50 years has not been up to scratch.

So don't waste those cork rings, they are rare as rockin horse poop!
Regards
Geoff
( all facts come from a very abused and tortured memory of a 30 minute documentary i saw years ago, don't crusify me if my memory is stunted!)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/25/2005 09:05AM by Tom Kirkman.

Geoff Roberts Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> The trees that the portuguese harvest from are
> well over 100 years old, and if i remember right,
> take at least that long to grow before you can
> harvest them and it's a once off harvest ,after
> that the tree is dead..

I must have seen a different document since I recall seeing that the trees were harvested every x years (less than 10) and the cork/bark grew back. So the harvestation did not kill the trees. I could be mistaken as well though since it's been a while...

William

Also one can use twine in colors, shrink tubing in colors, even cork tape

Just use EVA.

Cork trees can undergo their first harvest at about 20 years of age. The first stripping is known as "refugo" bark and subsequent strippings are done about every 7 years until the tree has reached about 150 years old, at which point it has pretty much ended its useful life. The better cork is obtain during the first 50 years of the tree's life. Cork plantations are on the way out as worldwide demand for cork continues to dwindle. Most cork goes to the insultating and flooring industry. You can read more about cork in the Volume 2 #1 issue of RodMaker.


.....................

Guess there is more demand then there is supply

Here is a link to the US Department of Commerce site showing where the cork is imported into the US comes from from. You might be surprised, just open the links to the various catagories and see.



[www.ita.doc.gov]

As i said Mikko, i watched the doco a long time ago, and as i stated,my information may not be totaly correct.




Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/26/2005 04:22AM by Geoff Roberts.