How to Tie a Hair Wing Set: Basic Fly Tying Instructions

Video Transcript

" Hi, this is Robert Brown for Expert Vilage.com and in this clip I am going to be showing you how to tie in the hair wing set on a dry fly. Now like every other fly you want to start by wrapping your hook shank with fly floss and then you cut yourself some wing material. In this case it is going to be hair. There is a lot of hair used in wings on flies. You want your wings to be about the same length as the distance from the back of the eye to the beginning of the bend so you just take your thumb and your next finger hold the fiber that you are going to tie in up there and make sure you have it measured the way you want. It is very important to pinch with these two fingers. With these two fingers, you are pinching that thumb together very tight on top so it is all on top. You kind of loosen your finger just a little bit so that you can get the floss up in there and you really tighten it down and bring this back up and now straight up is when you are applying the tension. That will keep all of the fibers on top of the hook. If you don’t do that when you pull it down and around, the fibers may spend around the hook and that is like one of the most frustrating thing is to learn when you are beginning. You want to wrap these fibers in with nice even side by side strokes just a little ways. Pull the back fibers straight up and clip them off. When you do that it will create a nice little slope that you can tie in and then you won’t be dealing with a huge knotted problem over here. You are going to work right back up to this front section and you are going to pull this bundle up and you are going to build up a little pile of thread in front of them. That little pile of thread is going to act to help keep the fur going straight up. Once you do that, you want to basically separate these into two equal parts. And if you play with it you should be able to start getting it to behave like you want. We are going to put two or three little wraps that way and we are going to put two or three little wraps this way and we start to real quickly see that we have a nice set of wings around the fibers of the hair so that I can get a set of wings that look something like that. There you go; you got a nice little set of wings. Fur wings are used on a lot of flies so that it is a technique that is very important to know. "