While watching a video of one of the Park Fly Shop guys tying a fly his hackle pliers slipped twice and he commented one of these days someone is going to invent a hackle pliers that work. I will not pretend to be that guy but I have tried a little trick that seems to help. Now if one of you tell me "Oh, we have known that for years, we thought everyone knew that," I'm going to be ticked. I have used electrical test clips from Radio Shack for hackle pliers for several years. I always suspected the edge was cutting/breaking the stem of the hackle from time to time. This week I took a piece of the smallest shrink tubing, also from Radio Shack, heated it and then placed the shrunken tube onto the hook of the test clip. The results seems to hold as good or better and it does not seem to cut/break the hackle stem as often. I have only used it on a few soft hackle nymphs so testing has not been extensive. I also put shrink tubing on my regular hackle pliers also. No testing yet there. Maybe the photo will help explain what I did in case I did not communicate my meaning adequately.
Test clip opened.jpg