I finally loaded it with a WF4F and hung it under a bamboo rod I found at a garage sale thirty years ago, and went down to Green Lake to try it out. The rod had languished in a closet for many years, after I had decided that its complete restoration would require more skills than I possessed. A few years back, after retirement I had another rod refurbished by a local craftsman and decided, "What the hell?" The rod had been neglected for years before I acquired it, and the list of its ills was long and varied (loose ferrules, missing windings and bent, rusted guides, excessively worn cork, etc., etc. etc.). Although I realize it probably destroyed whatever collector value the rod might have had, I wanted the snake guides replaced with something other than the pitifully small ones favored in the days of silk lines, and the badly-grooved metal stripper guide was a dead loss. The cork, badly worn and missing a few chunks from using it instead of the hook keeper, warranted complete replacement so, aside from the rod itself, the reel seat, the winding check, the hook keeper and the ferrules were the only salvageable parts (one of the male ferrules was an obvious replacement from some bygone era, being chrome-plated brass instead of nickel silver like the rest, but it did fit so I decided to let it be). The only marking on the entire rod was a stamped "Barney & Berry Inc." on the (rather nice) nickel-silver, slip ring reel seat. Any information on Barney & Berry would be appreciated. They were apparently bought by Winchester sometime in the 'thirties
Long story short: The rod performs adequately with a 4-wt. line, disappointingly its action can hardly be described as crisp, something more like a buggy whip comes to mind. Here are a few pictures of the rod with the Sunbeam mounted.
