Quote Originally Posted by redietz View Post
Did you factor in tailing material at all in cost/100 calculations? A cape with few or no spade hackles is going to require another source of tails, which adds to the cost, even though spade hackles are not "useable" for hackle.
Good question Bob. No, we did not include tailing material. If you read through the lengthy post there, it explains why. But in a nutshell, they all had relatively similar amounts and sizes of spade hackle. And if I wanted spade hackle in quantities above what a cape would provide, I would likely use a different source. In the end, the attempt here was to relate capes with respect to dry fly hackle. We, of course, realized the spade hackles might throw things off, but in the end, they did not.

And even if one of the lower scoring capes did have double the amount of spade hackle, but yet had a lower (i.e. more expensive) dry fly score, I'd question the decision to pay that much for the extra spade hackle. Anyway, just a different way to look at things.