First attempt at a wooden net

[jbird]

Well, Most of my free time finds me in the wood shop these days. After seeing some hand crafted wooden nets on the auction block at the National Trout Unlimited banquet last weekend, I knew what my next project must be. After some Youtube education, I went to work on my first net. I was seeing all these DIY steamers and soakers for softening up the thin hoop strips. As I was walking around my pool deck to get some PVC I have laying around, I stop and see my hot tub, Hmmmmm. This will serve as my soaker I threw the the strips into the tub at 105* and let em soak for about 4 hours. In the mean time, I set out to build my hoop template and handle.
My first discovery is my template had some pretty tight radiuses and the strips would crack if they were too thick. The curly maple I used does not respond well at all to the surface planer, so I had to rip them to 1/8" thickness and hand sand them (A drum sander would be nice) So my original plan of 3 hoop strips failed and I went with 5, much thinner stips. This worked quite nicely and they bent without much hassle.

At some point during the build, I inadvertantly threw out everything I learned on youtube and started a seatofthepants, head scratching design which resulted in an oversized shoulder section of the handle and an overall size that was a bit large. The hoop size "should" fit a replacement bag that I have yet to obtain.

Anyway, without any futher commentary, heres the results. The hoop is curly maple and black walnut. The handle is African zebrawood with an accent of African Padauk with curly maple and black walnut accents. i think I will just add a small ring bolt on the handle butt. The hoop openning is 7"x 16" and the handle is 12"





I dont know if a day will ever come that I will add these to my website. Theres an aweful lot of net builders out there that make mine look like something the cat dragged in. And the time involved in making these is exorbinant. In the mean time, some of my close fishing friends will be recieveng some sweet Christmas gifts