American made quality and ingenuity.

   The boys at Hodge & Sons have been hand crafting a wide variety of mechanical products since the late 50's.  Our founder, R.B. Hodge, is still active in the family design/manufacturing business.  He spends most of his time involved in design activities, and leaves the daily running of the business to his two sons, Robert S. & William S. ( Bill ) Hodge.  Bill's sons, Liam and Ronan, have received their first Zebco rods and fish with their uncle Robert at the family Bass pond...

   Fishing is in our blood...in the 50's R.B. and his wife Beverly spent many vacations road-tripping along the coastlines of mainland Mexico and Baja California.  They mainly fished the surf with the Centor spinning reels (the first spinning reels brought into the U.S.), as well as making some exciting trips into the surf in dugout canoes hand carved from entire trees.  In 1973, Tom Morgan (R.B.'s cousin) purchased the R.L Winston Rod Company.  It wasn't long after that Tom approached R.B. to produce a series of Trout reels for his fly rod company.  At the time we were completely consumed with our other design projects and really had no interest in designing a fly reel; not much fly fishing being done in the immediate family. 

   In the early 80's, Robert S. started to get serious about fly fishing for Steelhead in the Rogue and Applegate rivers.  This was the beginning of an ongoing passion for fly fishing.  Having grown up in a machine shop, what better to build than a fly reel?  At about the same time as R.B. started playing with building a fly reel, Tom called again to discuss the possibility to build some reels...Tom had seen some of our other design/manufacturing work and was impressed with the high quality.  Now, the timing was just right and we began to design and build the R.L. Winston "Vintage" reels.  These reels were a great success, and though the relationship with R.L. Winston is long past, Tom still depends on us to build his Bamboo Hand Mill Planes and rod tube caps and collars.