Homemade Fly Tying Tools

Tying your own flies can add an extremely rewarding aspect to fly fishing and building your own tools can, in turn, make tying flies a more rewarding experience. With the exception of scissors, which should be sharp and in good repair, just about all the tools you can use for fly fishing can be hand made, including a bodkin, dubbing teaser and a bullet-header.

Things You'll Need

• Needle
• Pencil
• Pen cap
• Wine bottle cork
• Small piece male velcro
• Epoxy or super glue

Instructions

Building Your Tools

1. Bodkins, otherwise known as probes or a "needle tool" are used in a multitude of applications, from applying cement to detailed, controlled work with the thread and tying materials. Rather than spend between $5 and $10, simply create your own with a needle and a piece of cork. "Pre-drill" the cork by inserting the needle a few millimeters in depth into the cork. Remove the needle, lightly coat those few millimeters of the needle with epoxy or super glue, and reinsert it into the cork, allowing the glue to set the needle firmly into the cork. Thus you have simply and economically made a bodkin.

2. A dubbing teaser is a tool used to make nymphs look "scruffy", thereby allowing air bubbles to become trapped in the dubbing to make the fly look more alive in the water. To craft a dubbing teaser, simply take the eraser end of a pencil, or a similar object, and wrap the top inch or so with a strip of "male", or the bristly side, of velcro. To use this tool, gently rub the dubbing with the velcro to "tease" or pull out individual or clumps of hair.

3. A bullet head tool can be used either to create a bullet head on a dry fly pattern, such as a hopper, or the tool can be used to assist your half hitch knot when you finish your fly. Because flies are tied in a wide range of sizes, a variety of bullet head tools is something you'll find you need. You can use a pen cap, stout straw, or any hollow, stiff tube to push and hold back your reverse tied deer hair to form a compact, durable bullet head.