Leiderman Rods

This one slipped through a few months ago and I forgot to post it… A 8’ 3wt Morgan w a gorgeous piece of buckets burl….

All wrapped up. A fun project to resurrect an classic field watch from . New crystal always makes a massive difference. Added a few pictures of my watchmaking space as well… the tools may be small but they are very, very plentiful and specific. This is fast becoming a new business endeavor but no plans to stop building rods. If you have a watch in need of some love please reach out… or if you’re interesting in purchasing this one it will be listed for sale at $550 (it’s a bit small for me at 34mm but perfect for smaller wristed folks…)

Almost done… I mentioned the hands we started with were not original to the watch… finding 100% authentic hands would likely lead to buying a donor watch to pull them off or lucking into someone having them. Both not worth the hassle on a watch if this value imho. The hands I’m replacing them with are nearly a perfect match… the seconds hand is about a .5 mm too long… but the style is correct. The dial markers have patina’d tritium lume… this would have started life white and darkened over time. I definitely want to match that look so mixing some lacquer and pigments, I tried getting pretty close to the dial color. The result looks much better than how this arrived and the final picture shows a nicely patina’d original dial and hands. We’re pretty darn close. To top it off the strap I purchased it off was trashed but I was able to find a NOS US Army military strap from 1965 which is an exact match. Hamilton made military watches during Vietnam and I could see them finding a ton of old, unused straps in storage and using them up on these field watches years later.

Quiet but still busy on all fronts… finished up a few recently and the bench is loaded up w builds for spring… this clean Epic graphite commission kicked off 2023.
*t

The end of summer and the start of the school year is always crazy in a dual teacher house but I managed to squeeze in a few rods at the tail end of summer… here’s a smooth and powerful 8’6” 5wt McFarland GTX… will tangle w some stream smallies soon I’m sure…