Golden Witch. Your Custom Rodmaking Supply House Since 1998

Upcoming Shop Closures & Order Notes – Please Read Carefully

New Note As Of 7/8/21.

Please read the new note in its entirety by clicking this link, or expect to suffer the consequences of your self-imposed refusal to know what you might have known. I take the time to write this stuff primarily for the benefit of my clients, secondarily for the benefit of my staff and myself.

Our final summer break is tentatively scheduled for 8/20/21 - 8/30/21, but may be adjusted as needed to suit family schedules. If the bamboo orders stack up too deeply, I may 'close' the shop in late July so I can spend a week at the bamboo warehouse in order to clear those orders off my plate. As always during this busy time, please order well in advance of your needs for custom items and bamboo. Thanks!!

If you go read the new note you'll learn critical information about:

Differential Lag Times - Fast For Most Non-Custom Orders & Not So Fast For Custom Orders - Be Patient & Kind
Updated Shop Rules - We Have Them; You Need To Understand Them Because We Do Not Make Exceptions
Departures & Arrivals - Stuff That Is Disappearing & Stuff You Need That's Back In Stock
Missing Emails - How To Find Them; How To Work Around Server Problems
Custom Parts & Special Orders - There Are Ways To Get Even More Interdasting Components
Freebies - How Many Thousand Vintage Guides & Tips Can We Give Away To Our Clients, That Is The Question
The Great Opportunity - Golden Witch Is For Sale

Thanks so much for your support, for skimming this overview, and for taking the time to read the whole darn thing HERE.

-Russ

Hello Rodmakers & Restorationists!

The Latest Ramblings

Rambling Along the Silk Road

Written by Matt West : Posted on May 20, 2021 : No Comments

by Andrew Laird Turner

The fly on which I caught my first trout was surely a simple, wingless wet fly – a gray hackle peacock perhaps. My father often chose simple wet flies for our early outings. They’re the perfect choice for beginners. Fish will take them dead drifted, swung and stripped.

As a kid, I never thought about how flies were tied even though fly tying material was always strewn about my father’s fly tying room. He tied coho and trout flies for local sporting goods shops. But his desk, with the wooden spools of thread and floss amidst the feathers and hair, was off limits. Much later, I came to understand his tying reflected the post-WWII consensus that modern materials were better. So the threads and flosses I had seen were nylon and rayon….

Read the whole Ramble in PDF

Quad Guides

Written by Russ Gooding : Posted on April 28, 2020 : No Comments

I’ve been sitting on a half-conceived ramble about making quadrate guides for a long while. Simmering. Cooling Off. Cogitating.

Please take this ramble as I intended my original emails within this post to be taken. Take the words as helpful, as informative, as well-intentioned, and as an honest summation of why it is completely impractical for Golden Witch as a company, or for me as an individual craftsman, to offer quad guides. If you’re patient, if you read to the bottom of my longest email located near the end of this post, you might learn something worthwhile about tackling craft-oriented problems. Or not.