He told of a situation in which many tackle sales distributors, like himself from all over the world, had converged on a rod blank factory somewhere in Asia. They were given a tour of the factory, to see how the blanks were made. One distributor produced a completed rod from a well known rod company & asked the factory foreman if he could reproduce it. The factory foreman took the rod, measured it inside & out & quickly had a mandrel made to copy this rod's blank. He then told the salesman to come back the next morning & there would be a dozen finished blanks for him to examine.
Sure enough, the next morning there were the rod blanks all done up to look exactly like the brand-named rod they'd copied - even down to the same color. The appearance & action of these blanks were an exact copy of the brand name rod.
I've heard stories like that before & I never knew exactly how true they were, or more importantly, how good these knock-offs were compared to the originals. Then I had the opportunity to find out for myself.........
Shortly after I'd been told the story above I made a rod for a client on a Thomas & Thomas rod blank. I've always been a fan of T&T. Their rod designer (& one of the company's founders), Tom Dorsey, is a rod maker I look up to with admiration. I can honestly say that T&T rod blanks are among the finest you can get & I've never had a problem with them. T&T blanks do what they say they will. Each T&T rod is designed & made in the USA.
As I was making the rod on the T&T blank, I stumbled upon a foreign made copy of the same rod blank. The technical aspects of each blank were the same. Still, the T&T blank cost $350 at the time, while the knock-off sold for about $100. Really? Could they really be the same? I wanted to find out so I bought the knock-off blank & made a rod on it.
Both blanks were the same length, line weight, & their overall weight was very close to each other. They were the same exact color (dark blue). Looking at them side by side you'd have a hard time telling them apart - until you looked very closely. I wrapped the two rods in different thread colors & used slightly different reel seats & grip shapes, but otherwise these rods were about the same. I even spaced the guides the same on each rod & used the same sized guides. Here's the T&T rod:
Now why would this be, that the more expensive rod blank was so much better? Well it could be several things: The quality of the raw graphite & resins that T&T uses are superior; someone who has been highly trained has rolled the blanks; another highly skilled person cooked the blanks; a more critical eye examined each blank section for quality control, etc. At the factory in Asia, perhaps they were more concerned with the number of blanks produced, less concerned with the quality of the raw materials, & in a hurry to get their product to market from a factory that has only been operating for a couple of years?
To finish up the story of the sales distributor for the big tackle conglomerate, his point was that with foreign companies being able to copy domestic-made rods so quickly, they were able to undercut the market. They never spent the money in research & design, or the wages & other expenses (like work place safety, insurance, taxes, etc) that domestic manufacturers have to pay. His theory was that these practices destroy innovation & as such, we cannot improve the things we use & make everyday. This, he believed, was why the quality of things are not what they used to be in many cases.
That's something to think about.