Before unpacking my traveling tying kit assembled for the Idaho Fish-In, I decided that this would be a good time to clean up my tying area. You know, find those 20 spools of fine oval tinsel that are hidden under the clutter, I know that there are at least four pairs of scisssors on that desk somewhere, not to mention a couple of dry fly necks that I haven’t seen in a month of Sundays.
Brilliant me says to VEE, lets reorganize our tying stuff and make it more user friendly. Yeah right. Takes VEE twenty minutes and she’s watching TV and having a cup of coffee. Me, I’m halfway through day 3 and seeing no end in sight.
First step is organizing feathers. Settled on three large totes that seal (36"X18"X7"). One for pheasant skins and other special skins like my Jungle Cock full skin, One for dry fly hackle (fills the container to about half), and one for wet fly hackle and wings (also about half full). Also put in fresh No-Pest strips to protect the investment (read kids college fund).
My sixteen drawers in the tying bench are slowly being sorted, one for chenille, one for wool and synthetic yarn, one for small packeages of furs (note to self, buy another tote for full animal skins) and so on. About half the drawers are filled and I can almost see the top of my tying desk. Yes, it is white, just as I thought.
I’d like to be done before midnight tonite (yeah, right) so I’d better get back at it. Still gotta reorganize hook storage, that should be fun.
Anyone else had this problem with your tying area, fly fishing gear?
:? I clean up my tying bench 3 or 4 times a year, and reorganize the drawers so that I can find everything without digging through them. After about a week of tying, I’m back to digging again until the next clean-up. I’ve decided that I need a bigger desk to work on, and a better way of sorting thing out in the drawers. I have an old oak teacher’s desk that needs to be refinished. It has about one and a half times the surface space as the one I’m using, with bigger drawers. I keep putting it on my list of summer projects, but it keeps getting bumped down the list. One of these days.
CJ
I live in an apartment, so my tying “desk” is just a TV dinner table. I keep everything in a large plastic toolbox (well, a collection of tool boxes actually). I keep a small container on the “table” that contains partially used feathers. This means I have access to a lot of materials that I’ve been using, without having to dig through the box every time I want to use a new feather for tail or legs. Still, materials I’ve not used for awhile will migrate to the bottom of the box, and then it can be a bit of an Easter Egg hunt to find specific things.
I’ve got a rather larger tackle box with a large top section and a side section that fits four large compartment type boxes. I’ve exchanged 2 of those boxes for one large deep box to fit my dry fly capes and my wet fly skins. I’ve got another 3 draw box where I keep extras. Although, that is not to say I’ve got stuff I thought I’d need but have yet to touch and a small collection of you never know
I’d be scared if I had a room or let alone a desk just for tying…now the garage is another story…clearing out a section that looks like it could fit a small rod building shop…or at least make it work :lol:
I feel your pain. I have a good amount of stuff and am in the process of moving. :shock:
Most of my belongings are packed, except my tying stuff. You never know, I may need to tie that special fly before I leave.
My dilemma is, do I sort it all out? Or do I throw it in boxes because as previous posters have noted, sorting doesn’t seem to last very long.
Don’t feel too bad Ron. I have been trying to organize my library for several years now. New books get piled on the spare bed until I need to use it or the pile gets unstable as I keep falling farther behind. Then they get crammed onto a shelf or into a drawer at random without being cataloged. I think there were five or six hundred books when I started and and a lot more than that now. I almost cried when the index to the ones I did have put away was accidentally deleted about a year ago and I knew the backup disc was way out of date. I am not nearly crazy or ambitious enough to try to do the tying materials at the same time. That’s why I have three grizzly necks and at last four packs of olive zonker strips but no white zonker strips and only a well picked over brown neck (that I know of).
You do realize that it’s futile? That this is a never ending project that will repeat itself over and over and over and over … . Out of curiousity, how many cups of coffee will VEE consume waiting for you to finish? :lol:
To put it in its simplest form, I have come to embrace the hell hole I call my “corner of the basement,” and to accept it for what it is…a hell hole. Fly tying, rod building, wood working & general storage of my “stuff.” I need to make room for the mini lathe and vacuum system before the weather goes south. Hmmmmmm, what can I pile on top of what to make more room? The problem is there are too many horizontal surfaces to pile stuff on.Get rid of them and the problems go away…right?
CJ, you clean your bench 3 or 4 times a year. Man, what a glutton for punishment. Bet you don’t have twenty spools of tinsel though. Good on ya. I get to mine every 3 or 4 years.
Joe,
Like your basement idea. Our situation is a llittle diferent though. Our tying area used to be our dinning room. My lovely fly tying wife said, “Who needs a dinning room, we can eat at the coffee table. We need a tying area.” When non-fly fishing people come over (We actually know a few, but are trying to distance ourselves from them.) they get a little disturbed by the squirrel tails, mole skins, and various bird parts that adorn my desk top. Not to mention their children stubbing their tiny toes on size 1/0 salmon hooks that have fallen on the carpet unnoticed.
Somehow VEE manages to keep her area neat (I should say areas, one for trout, one for Dremel bugs, and one for classic salmon flies) while my one area turns to a jumbled mess at a single glance.
Glad to know I’m not alone in this terrible suffering. I’ll try to get a pic of the area before I start tying again.
I see you have the same tying light that I have. Got mine at Home Depot on closeout for $10. Downside is that it does not fold up for traveling very well. But on the bench it’s great.
I tidy my bench about twice a year. I recover my tying desk top with white butcher paper to protect the top from glues, cements and such as well as make it easier to see little hooks. Like everyone else here, the “organized bench” only last a few weeks or so.
That mess on your tying desk is not your fault. It has to do with a natural force in the universe called entropy. Left to natural forces, all things in the universe go from an organized to a disorganized state, entropy. My wife isn’t buying it and she wants to know why there is more entropy around my fly tying area than in the rest of the universe. I will have to work on that one.
Ron has been tying flies for X years, and Vicki has been tying flies for Y years. They both decide to clean up their tying materials. If Vicki finishes in 30 minutes and starts drinking coffee, how cups of coffee will she drink before Ron finishes, or gives it up as futile. Bonus: How many pounds of coffee will Vicki have to buy to make that many cups of coffee?
Right now my tying area looks like a small tactical nuclear device went off on it and I bet it will look that way for sometime now for I have started tying flies for salmon and the upcoming winter/spring steelhead season. No sense in cleaning it up until the season is over which will be April of next year. Then, well then we have the low land lake opener for trout and after that bucket mouths all through summer till July or Aug. I will be tying flies for these two activities. Lets see now we have summer steelhead and sea run cutthroat to tie up for so I still see no time to clean up. Oh, that brings me back to now which is salmon season and the up coming winter/spring steelhead season. I need to go to the fly shop and get more material. I can’t seem to find any claret colored pheasant rump.
Thats not funny Ron. I got some here. I know it, its right here under the Rhea feathers,…well it was yesterday. I’m off to the shop. I can always use more claret rump feathers and who knows what else I will find there that I need for my next pattern. Now, if I could only find that tri-colored marabou I bought last week. :lol:
