I bet some of you fellow tiers have known for a long time about making hopper legs with a hopper leg tool. I've been tyng a long time and didn't know of the existence of this gadget until I opened my latest issue of fly tyer magazine while waiting for my eye doc to show up. So after the exam (I need another frickin procedure) I ran to the craft shop and bought a latch hook tool. It wouldn't fit in my fly vise so I ran it out to the garage and carefully mounted it my bench vise and cut some pheasant tail barbs and tried to follow the instructions in the magazine. First problem was the latch hook I bought was too big but I thought I could make it work if careful. Nope. So I got a piece of string to at least figure the principle of the thing and Nope again. Couldn't even get a frickin knot. Multiple tries, multiple nopes. My wife came out to garage curious about all the swearing she was hearing. So in frustration I decided to see if there was a video to watch and hello there's Al Beatty showing how it's done, but instead of putting the tool in the vise, he put the whole pheasant feather in the vise and made it look easy. And it was, even with a latch hook tool that was too big. I'm now getting passable legs that I'm sure will work. I'm posting this in case I'm not the only one who didn't know about this tool (with my luck I'm probably that guy)
