Elk Hair Caddis by Charlie Craven

[Music] all right let's tie an El Kheir catice this is a sort of standard-issue catus pattern developed by al trough and is one of the sort of requisite flies that you want to learn to do as it shows lots of techniques for other flies so I'm going to tie this this is a size 16 T emka 100 s PBL that's that super point barbless hook it's one-and-a-half heavy wire and I like that foot because it's it holds up better to the strong tippet that we have these days as well as to the thread tension that I need to put on it to tie this wing down so I'm going to start with some B this 40 knot thread looks like it says for OTT but it's really four key not when I start with some views 40 not thread I'm going to tie a brown coloured one so I'm gonna use brown thread 40 knot thread is plenty big enough to do the work that we need with the el-kheir here I'm going to start this thread about two I likes back from the hook I I'm gonna make a thread base over that tag all the way back to the bin just dressing the shank a nice smooth layer of thread and then all my thread back to the front where I started it and I'm going to tie in a piece of extra small or fine size copper wire you can use gold here to work fine really just about any color will work fine it's barely gonna show and I'm going to take this piece of wire and come in from the front you can see the right angle between the hook and the thread so I'm just coming from the front side with this piece of wire up against the thread on the bottom of the hook and I'll catch it with a few turns and pull that tag end around my near side and then I'm going to draw it down to length and wrap back over it along my near side of the hook all the way back to the bend then I'll bring the thread about halfway up the hook shank now we're going to dub the body you know I'm going to use super fine dubbing here I'm going to use some brown and of course you can tie these in whichever color you like brown olive tan gray yellow all good colors I'm going to put this dubbing down fairly thin you can see I've got some bear thread between the end of the dubbing and the hook shank I'm going to use that bear thread to distribute over the shanks so that I can get my first turn lined up my first turn the dubbing lined up back here at the bend of the hook now I'll begin to work forward they'll be just a nice even body up to where I started the thread and then from that point I can work back and forth just finishing off that table you can see it's just a slight taper to that body it's not a huge degree of taper there I'm going to make a thread base up to the hook eye and back to the front edge of the body again and that's so that when I tie in my hackle and ultimately my wing I'm not telling on bare foot shank I want to have have a threaded base there so now I'm going to select out a neck apple and I pick one out here this is a on a gauge this is about a size 16 kind of a smallish 16 but you can see when I spin that feather around the body of the fly the hackle fibers are about 1 and 1/2 of gaps and that's what I want for a fly like this will measure the hackle over the dubbed body you can see it's a little longer than if I measure it up here over the hook shank it's closer to just one tooth gap so we're accommodating the larger Arbor of the Dubb body there so our hackle is just slightly under sized so I'm going to take this feather and you can see there's a tapered base here too wide at the base and you can see that stem is thick then as I come up about here so there becomes very uniform from there on up you can see that's a nice long feather so I'm going to trim that feather off there and at the base I'm going to strip a few fibers from the both sides of the stem along the base so I'm going to tie this feather in very much the same way I just tied that wire I'm going to with the inside of the feather toward the hook I'm going to set it in that right angle and catch it up here behind the hook I and anchor it very tightly in place you can see I've got some bare skin beyond my tie down the reason for that bear stand let's just talk about that for a minute is that when I make this first turn a hackle see how those will stand straight up if I don't leave that bare stem if I just tie the feather end with no bare stem and I begin to rap you can see how that first draft wants to lay down so if you're getting hackle fibers that are laying down that's how you solve that so back to the right way here I'm going to tie that feather in again with the inside of the feather toward the hook shank when I grab you my hackle pliers and I'm going to begin to wrap here at the front edge and I try to make these wraps they are going to travel I try to make them as upright as I can as I go just evenly spaced turns from the front to the back being conscious to keep the front side of the feather facing the front of the hook and when I get all the way to the back here I'm going to pick up my wire and catch the tip of that feather once I've done that I can release my feather from my hackle pliers and I'm going to wrap my wire forward through this hackle now the question I get on how to do this all the time is how do you get the the wire forward through the hackle without binding it all down and the answer is to just wrap the wire as if there were no hackle there if you try to think about it and miss things you're going to miss the stuff you can see and hit the stuff that you you can't see so I'm just going to evenly spaced these wire wraps I said evenly spaced these wire wraps coming forward right up to the front and then I'll tie that wire off with a couple turns of thread you can see that didn't disrupt any of the hackle and that wire just barely shows I'm going to come in and I'm going to trim the feather out and then with the wire I'm just going to hold tight on my bobbin and pop that off that fine wire I'll break very easily so there's our Palmer body and that's the same way you do a stimulator or a really any variety of cornered body flies so now I'm going to take some natural bull elk hair like this up a bit here so natural bull elk here and bull elk I like for an elk air cat is because it is a hard hair it's got a thick wall with a small inside diameter and it doesn't flare a ton which is what I want on this fly I'm going to cut a pretty stout sized clump to start with because I'm going to thin this out you can see there's a bunch of underfur dubbing looking for in there that's the under fur from the critter and we want to get rid of all that so the trick to doing that is to hold the hair as close to the tips as you can and sort of fan it out in your fingers and pull all this underfur out all those short flying hairs until you're left with just clean long hairs I'm going to check and make sure there's nothing extra long sticking out of the tip ends and I'll take this here I'm going to put it in my medium-size stacker to start with if you've got the hair cleaned out you don't have to pound the tar out of it to get it even you can see I tapped at about a half dozen times and I've got nice neat clean even bud ends there or tip ends so we'll take that hair out of the stacker and once I've got the hair stacked I have a better idea of how much hair I've got so I can sort of spin my clump down a bit I'll also look through those tips and make sure I don't have any broken ends now once I've done that I'm going to take the same clump of hair and put it in my smaller diameter stacker so I'm gonna put it in my small stacker and what the small stacker does is this is not so much to restock the hair as it is to read bundle it you can see when I stack that up that hair is in a nice tidy neat little bundle it's going to make it really a little easier to handle so I've taken the hair out of the stacker and I've got the tips going the wrong direction which is not uncommon at all and that's just part of the way that I do it so to change the direction here I'm going to turn this hair up grab it and reverse it and now I've got it in the other hand now the whole trick to that is I'm not moving my fingers back and forth I'm just opening and closing as I grab the hair taken measure this hair in a straight line over the top of the hook and I'm measuring from the back edge of the hook I to the bend of the hook I'm using my thumbnail here on the backside to make that measurement mark that measurement once I've got that there I'll but my hands together just thumb to thumb when I cut that hair off straight o'clock straight across as clean and close as I can now my thread has flattened out a bit so I'm going to spin it up I'm going to move it to the middle of those two hook I like so I've got two hook I likes here behind the hook I I want the thread hanging in the middle I'm going to take these buttons I'm going to bring them out over the hook I and slide them back right down flat to the body as close as I can you can see the buttons are behind the hook I I'm going to take a turn of thread around a second turn right behind the first then I'm going to tighten the thread toward me so you can see the bobbin is pulling back toward my chest and now without letting go of the wing I'm going to make a band of thread here and this band of thread is going to anchor that hair down and compress it all so that it's flattened against the hook I can sneak one more wrap up here at the butt-ends just anchor everything in place and then I can let go of my wing now one thing I always like to do here is pull pull on your thread you can see the hair doesn't move it doesn't react anymore come in and whip finish right over those buttons turn my thread up you can see by pre-cutting the buttons the hook is completely exposed now here's all on top of the hook and I'll come in with a bit of silver as ultra-thin I like this tiny little brush it doesn't goop things up I'm just going to cover that band of thread the thin layer the solder is make sure you go all the way around cook that with my UV light and that is our finished Oh care caddis standard issue a requisite pattern for a fly tire these days a nice straight chunk al khair makes a huge difference remember to size your hackle just slightly undersized to accommodate the body stack that here up nice and neat and avoid all those broken tips get to work [Music]

Channel: Charlie's Fly Box

Views: 119,473

Keywords: Elk Hair, Caddis, Charlie Craven, Al Troth, Dry Fly, Fly Tying, Fly Fishing

Id: puBFY6CQjWQ

Length: 13min 17sec (797 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 26 2017