Recent additions/improvements you've made to your bench
- Thread starter swimmy
- Start date
flybill
Life of the Party
Damn it! Now I want one!!
swimmy
An honest tune with a lingering lead
Every bench needs one. Love having moving water and a streamer swimming in the background while I'm tying.
Will also be super functional when I'm testing out different material/technique/patterns.
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Yes
Very cool
Very cool
swimmy
An honest tune with a lingering lead
Very cool. I'll have to add one to my bench - when I get one again (lost my cave while we're stuck in a rental). The only critique is I would question the accuracy of fly motion given the induced turbulence from the nozzle jet (as opposed to action imparted by the fly simply moving through water). Although that wouldn't be too difficult to fix by rigging some sort of flow expander with a grid of laminar flow vanes.
BTW, do they make a larger model for saltwater and musky flies? Some of the squid and mackerel patterns I tie would be hanging out both sides.
BTW, do they make a larger model for saltwater and musky flies? Some of the squid and mackerel patterns I tie would be hanging out both sides.
swimmy
An honest tune with a lingering lead
The original was much larger. You might can find one on ebay although from what I hear, they are a pain in the ass to clean.
But how big do you need? I put a fly in yesterday that was 7" and there was plenty of room.
Hi SF,
You can create a very simple "flow-straightener" by gluing together a block of plastic soda straws. If you put that block between the nozzle and the viewing segment, that will create near-laminar flow through the viewing section. I agree that a larger "viewing" chamber would be helpful for larger flies. Even in the case of Swimmy's video, there are likely to be wall-effects because the fly extends so close to the wall of the chamber. In fact, you could upscale the whole apparatus quite easily by using a larger aquarium and a larger "viewing" chamber plus "flow-straightener". You can purchase these kinds of submersible pump at any decent aquarium store.
In any real-world application (i.e., a trolled or stripped fly), there will also be environmental turbulence. That is certainly the case when we are trolling our flies for albacore or stripping them back at a stop.
Steve
My largest to date was an honest 9".
Simple/elegant solution. Love it. But yes, no shortage of turbulence in the prop wash. Can't wait to do some @Cabezon style tuna bucktailing later this summer.
sadly, seeing what a fly does in a simple straight line current won't really tell you very much about how a musky fly will actually fish. Now, if you could build it much wider, and have the ability to stop the current instantly and the restart instantly that might work.
I mean, those are great for seeing what a trolled fly is going to look like.
I'm thinking if the fly was tethered to a thin wire rod that could be manipulated to simulate different retrieves. A larger tank would be necessary though.
A simple solution to your stop/start scenario is to turn the submersible pump on / off. A more elegant solution would be to connect the pump's power supply to a rheostat that would allow you to ramp the current (and therefore the flow) up and down.
To actually track the flow, you can use fluorescein dye. If you add in drops of this green dye, you can track the flow of water into and then past the fly (and track turbulence before and after).
Steve
swimmy
An honest tune with a lingering lead
Couple other cool additions to the bench. My peg board was getting a little crowded so I decided to put some items on cable loops.
Like with anything there are trade offs. Packages are not as easy to access as just being on pegs but I can fit a lot more in the same amount of space.
Like with anything there are trade offs. Packages are not as easy to access as just being on pegs but I can fit a lot more in the same amount of space.
Oliver1329
Life of the Party
Awesome! I'm going to have to try that sometime (once I get enough fly tying materials that is)
oh hell yeah! that's just ridiculously simple.
swimmy
An honest tune with a lingering lead
Right?
And visually I like it better as I can see all the colors and know what I have/don't have.
a highly underrated thing to have.
At some point, once my tying area becomes more permanent, I'll have to set something up like this for most things outside of bucktail (just too much of it). Maybe add some small clips to each bag so that I don't have remove multiples if the one I want is in the middle.
