5-Harnell
Harnell’s name is not common among the fiberglass fly rod makers, but Harnell was selling hollow tube fiberglass rods a year or two after Conolon and Shakespeare. Harnell is perhaps less known because hits founder’s interest was bass and saltwater fishing. The Harnell 1955 catalog listed 75 rod models and said that the company had sold 1,500,000 rods. There were five fly rod models selling for $25.95 each. Harnell rods are recognized by their jet black finish.
This Harnell 655 rod with its black finish has guides under-wrapped in gold and over-wrapped in red. The grip is a solid length of cork where the grain of the wood is easily visible. Every other rod in my collection has cork grips made of a series of cork rings glued together and then shaped in the same manner as they are made today. This particular rod has a non-original fighting butt added by a previous owner.
It would be interesting to know the original motivation to assemble grips from rings instead of using a solid piece of cork as Harnell did. Was it structural strength, economics, or the availability of solid lengths of cork that drove the decision? If you, the reader, have any knowledge regarding this, please comment to this post.
Harnell 655
Casting a DT 8wt line, this rod reached 87 feet without stretching the curls out of the line or working on my stroke timing. It has very small stripping guides by today’s standards, and this is common with all early fiberglass rods. They would benefit from larger guides. It is also interesting that my Pflueger 1495 reel almost didn’t fit in the seat, which needed to open slightly further. This didn’t appear to have resulted from the addition of a fighting butt. I doubt that I would reach 100 feet with the same line in my newest graphite 8wt, and that is not a lot of improvement for 50 plus years and hundreds of dollars.
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