How to Prepare the Fly Body Material: Fly Tying Tips for Fly Fishing

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Ed Story on behalf of expertvillage.com. My website is www.feather-craft.com fly fishing. Now we are going to prepare the fly body material. I'm going to take the pine squirrel hide and once again fold it in half, I'm going to take the scissors and cut out a small clump with the base of the hide. I want to clump it is a clump of fur that looks like this. What we are going to do is finger bland the guard hair in the under fur like this. We just mix it back and forth between our fingers until the guard hair is blended into the underfur and we have a glob of fur that we are not going to use this we are going to tease this out almost into a cob web because we are going to use a finish up method. I teased out into a cob web. Now I'm going to lay on the under side of the fly tyeing thread. I'm going to moisten my finishing finger and rub it against my thumb for traction like that and I'm going to pinch that like this. The fur on the tying thread I roll on it one direction only and you could see that we have a nice pinch nob with a blended fur on the thread. Our next step is to make the fly body by simply winding the thread off the hook shank in close wraps. Up over the lead wire wrap and we continue to wrap the material on the thread in this case it is a clump of pine squirrel hide that we made into a blended dabbing material by finger blending the guard hairs into the under curl of the hide and now I'm building the fly head preparing to finish the fly. Now we are going to finish the fly with a simple wood finish. Using a wood finish tool. 1,2,3,4,5 and we could even build a tacker of the fly head while we build the wood finish and finish the fly and our fly is ready to fish. This is a trout fly that is meant to fished deep that is why we weighted the front half of the hook with lead wire wraps. Lead wire wraps were .020 or .025 and the fly is most often fished under a strike indicator. "