The possibilities of wire

[ScottP]

http://stevenojai.tripod.com/hotwirecad.htm

Many of them have taken quite a few nice fish, especially on the Madison River.

PT/TB

I dare you to swing this one through a riffle on the Madison in the evening; don't let your mind wander or you'll have the rod jerked out of your hands. I always tied these with black holographic tinsel for the shellback; the floss looks to be a lot easier to use.

Regards,
Scott

[gpatton]

AlanB, great work with the wire bodies. It would have been useful to have some of these this week as I was having difficulty getting my flies deep enough this past week eventhough they were some of my heaviest ties. Great job.

Greg

[AlanB]

If you want to learn to weave then the fastest way is just to weave. Seems obvious but what I found was that if I tied one fly and wove that by the time I had got the next fly ready to weave I had forgotten what I learned on the first. The solution was to get 6 hooks the same ready to weave. You have to finish the thread at this point anyway so when you do put it aside. Then weave all 6 one after another. If you want to add anything after the weave don't do this until all 6 are woven. At some point during those 6 woven bodies something will click.

My technique was helped a lot by getting an order for 100 dozen a few years ago. Tie that many and you do have a good idea how to do it.

If I want a shell back on a Czech nymph style fly I don't tie in buoyant materials to achieve this. To maintain the density of the fly I simply run a permanent marker down the back of the fly. Weaving the fly uses about 25% more wire than winding the wire to form the body.

Another good source for coloured wire are the bead craft suppliers. Mostly I use 0.4mm, which will tie down to size #18 as a single strand. For smaller flies and for using multi coloured twisted strands at smaller sizes I have some 0.2mm. These craft wires work out a lot less expensive than UTC wire. For less than the price of a spool of UTC I can get a 90 meter (about 342 feet) spool of the 0.4 mm beading wire. I probably should look into bulk spools but at this price I,m not sure what the saving would be.

(For the technically minded: 0.4 mm wire is 26 AWG or 0.0159 inches. 0.2 mm wire is 32 AWG or 0.00795 inches, approximately.)

Expanding a little more on the first post I am working on some bend back salt water flies with wire woven bodies. Once I'm happy with them I'll post pics.

Cheers,
A.

[kelkay]

Excellent flies, I loved looking at them. You did one fantastic job on them, that is for sure.