This weeks tip is a great one, submitted by Gene Dellinger, AKA Flyfish2 of Clear Spring, MD
. It may well help you to resurrect a family heirloom, which would otherwise just gather dust.
Gene has a neat idea many of us can certainly put to good use. GE
Here is his tip:
I have a fly-tying equipment tip I would like to share. It
will probably only be of interest to the old-timer cheapskates like myself.
It is for those of us who tied flies for a long time before the advent of ceramic-tube
bobbins.
Here it is, for what it's worth.
Being a child of the "not long after the Depression" set, and having spent
the war years (WWII) with my "never throw anything away" grandparents, I
have accumulated enough stuff to put a Montana pack rat to shame.
Having been involved with tying flies for awfully close to half-a-century now,
I wore out a lot of steel-tube bobbins before I switched over to ceramic tubes, a few years ago.
Yep, they were all retired comfortably to my tying kit, in the hopes that granddad's
"You never know when you might need them" would come to pass.
While I was sitting at my bench one day last Winter, pondering the tube, and
the outrageous price of a new ceramic bobbin I had just added to my arsenal,
I found myself grumbling that, "It just looks like glass to me!"
The next moment, I was digging through an old box of stuff looking for the long
forgotten packets of glass seed-beads I had liberated from the trash back
when my young daughter had lost interest in making a beaded band for my
fishing hat. "You never know when you might need them," I scolded her,
"Dad, you never throw anything away - you're like a trash collector!"
I sorted through those beads looking for the most perfectly round specimens,
and dug out a few of my old friends for an experiment. I carefully glued the
glass beads to both ends of the worn steel tubes of my favorite old bobbins,
with 5-minute epoxy, and hung them aside to await the test.
My bench is now littered with bobbins with a past - and they do the job at
least as well as the fancy, high-priced, ceramic, "wonder-bobbins" of today.
Even the ancient fifty-pound Chase that tied my very first fly, way back in
the Dark Ages, has a place of honor amongst it's many successors. I don't
use it much - it's almost as big as my vice - but it reminds me of that
very first trout on a fly that "I" tied. It's good to have old friends
around. You never know when you might need them.
Thanks Gene, you have given us much more than a useful tying tip, you have
given us a vehicle to incorporate our past and present into a more meaningful
future.
If you have any tips or techniques, send them along, most of this
material has been stolen from somebody, might as well steal your ideas
too! ~ George E. Emanuel
(Chat Room Host Muddler)
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