I am new to this endeavor and have some questions.

When you have final planed a strip and decide that it is substandard and you wish to replace it with another strip, how do you heat treat a single strip and what is the procedure? (Bruce Combest)

What I've done in that situation is make up a set of dummy rough strips out of maple and just bind up your replacement bamboo strip with 5 of the dummy strips.  This will keep your replacement strip straight and the entire bundle will have about the same thermal mass as the original bundle of six bamboo strips and as long as you treat at the same time/temp as your original treatment the replacement strip should be very close.  (Ned Guyette)

I usually bind an extra piece to the outside of the bundle when I heat treat. You might want to seek out one of Martin-Darrell's new heat treating set ups. They are extruded metal (aluminum?) that nestle the strips when put in the oven. I just got mine Monday, but man they look nice. They should work as well for one strip as they do 6.  (Bob Maulucci)

Being able to heat treat single, double, etc., strips was one of the design criteria, so yeah, it works fine. I actually think it better to heat two strips minimum when doing this, one directly across from the other, to minimize or counteract the stresses.  (Martin-Darrell)

I have taken a number of strips from the original culm and bundled them up as well as possible to heat treat for one. I now carry four extra strips all the way through the rod building process to rough planing in case I need extras. I will have to make a rod from the remainders some day.  (Steve Trauthwein)

I used to make 7 strips for 6 strips rods - in fact on my first 6 rods. I never used them and made a section out of them. Then I made several rods without problems until I cut a very thin tip section with a plane. I used two pieces of fresh bamboo with  outsides/enamel facing up and down in the oven. It worked with about 1/2 the time for the 6 sections. But I did watch the bake carefully for the correct color. I pulled them out a few times and rotated as well as turned them over (like Garrison).  (Rex Tutor)

I routed shallow V-grooves in a long piece of wood and bind them into that. Somebody suggested this in a Planing Form several issues ago, but he used a maple dowel. Couldn't figure out how to rout a straight groove in a dowel.  (Bill Hoy)

While preparing tip strips for glue up I unfortunately broke one. I need to make a replacement but I have to go back to the drawing board, so to speak, and rough bevel, heat treat and final plane this new strip. What are the recommendations from the list as to heat treating this new strip. Since it will not be bound to the other 5 strips, I am concerned about over cooking.  (Bill Bixler)

M-D's  heat treating fixtures are quite handy for heat treating a single strip.  Otherwise, I bind the strip to some extra strips from former rods or a couple of dowels.  (David Van Burgel)

That's a good idea as you'll carbonize a single strip for sure unless you really watch it.  (Tony Young)

The first strip you break is the worst, after that it's not such a big deal.  David makes some good suggestions and Tony is also correct. Another alternative is to heat the strip for less time. I treat my bound strips for 7 minutes at 325, I would do a single strip for 2 & 1/2 minutes at 325 with a end to end flip half way through.  (Al Spicer)

I just had the same problem (for the second time on this rod). I just bound the strip to a wood dowel and heat treated. Seems to have worked without any trouble.  (Pat Higgins)

When you choose to trash a strip and make a new one, how do you handle the heat treating of the strip. You can't put the other strips that have already been heat treated back in the oven, so what options are there. I was thinking of binding my single strip to a dowel rod, so it sets straight. Also, is  the  time you treat for  affected since this lone strip isn't bound (protected) by other strips.  (Mark Bolan)

I had overcooked some strips, and set them aside. When I needed to do a single strip some time later, I used 5 of the baked ones, and the new strip. I worked great.  (Chad Wigham)

I try to handle this two ways.  First, I almost always rough out and heat treat an extra strip or two to go along with each rod section. I'll split to 28-32 pieces on the tips, and 24-26 pieces for butts. The extra pieces are bound together and heat treated like the rest. Second, I use the heat treating fixtures (gizmo's) that Martin-Darrell Odom sells for all my strips.   Should I need to heat treat a single strip, the fixtures make it simple.

BTW, before MD came out with the fixtures, I often bound a strip to a hickory or oak dowel and heat treated it that way.  I usually shortened the time a little, since two sides of the strip were exposed directly to the heat.  (Harry Boyd)

OK, I get the extra strips.  The thing that I'm hung up on right now is what do you do with node staggering?  I guess if you used 2 x 2 x 2 staggering you can do 3 extra strips and if you use 3x3 you can do 2 extra.  Am I way off-base on this?

I haven't really worried about it until now.  I'm just starting to build a "special" rod for a guy I know.  When I build rods for myself, I live dangerously and don't worry about extras.  (Todd Talsma)

I cut my strips to length before splitting.  For example, if I'm making a a 7' 6" rod, the finished strips will be about 45.75" long.  I measure down from the top of the culm 57" (45" + 4" extra" + 8" for node staggering), and cut 1" above the first node below that mark.  I then cut out that node, and use the next 57" for butt sections.  So both the sections I split for 7' 6" rods are 57" long.

I use the strips for each section exactly as they came from the culm.  I number them 1-6, 1-6, 1-6, 1-6, etc.  If there is a leaf node or other problem that makes a strip unusable, I discard that strip before numbering.  Even when I split to 32 strips, I'm happy with 25 or 26 good strips.  That will make 4 tips, plus an extra strip or two.

At this point I stagger nodes, and cut to length (49" in the above example).  The extra strips are not cut to length, but left at 57"+. Should I screw a strip up down the line somewhere, I then match the node staggering needed and cut the strip to length.  Leaving the extra strips long sometimes forces me to deal with a few more nodes, but that only takes a few minutes.

Truth is, I haven't screwed up a strip bad enough to have to replace it in quite a few rods; though saying that almost guarantees I will screw up everything I touch tomorrow.  I've got a handful of rough planed strips out in the shop that I'll one day turn into a couple of Frankenstein rods.  (Harry Boyd)

You probably will get a variety of answers to this one.  Those that use MD's fixtures will chime in that it's easy to lash one on and treat it.

Once you have made enough mistakes, you'll have enough scrap around to bind up with it.

Although it's extra work,  I like to make extra strips from the start.  I like to split out two culms and make 3 rods out of the two.  If I'm not spastic, there is plenty there to get 42 decent tip strips and 24 decent butt strips.  I just heat-treat all at once and then I have no hesitancy to chuck a bad one.  BTW, I alternate strips from 2 culms in each rod (sacrilege, I know).  (Jerry Madigan)

You might consider planing to final dimension before heat treating. The shrinkage for a tip section is about .004", but exposure to relative humidity  in your shop will regain about .002", leaving a loss of about .002". Butt sections shrink about .006", but regain about .003", for a loss of .003". Those figures are from tests done by three independent rodmakers and were presented last year at Corbett Lake by Don Andersen and me (check out a report here).

If you take the shrinkage into  consideration when planing to final, you can avoid all those nasty problems such as you have mentioned.  (Ron Grantham)

When I flamed my culms it was easy to produce seven or eight likely strips and finally select the six best.

Now that I have this oven thing I bind up six strips and cook them, but it leaves me no spares for errors or discovering that one was not as good as I might like. How do you all overcome this?

And, whilst I'm being silly, my heat gun oven is operating horizontally and I wonder if there may be advantages in altering it to vertical mode.  Doing this will mean it has to be used outside due to headroom restraints, as it's 2 meters long and, for various reasons, needs to be, this causes me weather problems and the need for skyhooks to hang it from.

I'm being lazy, since if I sit down for long enough with enough red wine I shall probably fathom an answer, but you may be able to save me the hangover, perhaps?  (Robin Haywood)

I just bind the six strips and then hand-bind the extra strip or two right to the bundle of six.

I have a hot-air oven set horizontally. I reverse the strips halfway through the process. I use temp gauges at three locations and change the heat gun setting as necessary.  (Steve Weiss)

Bind up the six and them bind any additionals you please to them. Open a good bottle wine and hope for the best. If it doesn't turn out right, at least you can enjoy the wine.  (Don Schneider)