Fly Tying: Spinning Deer Hair - Tips and Techniques

what's going on everybody Gunnar here and and today I just want to do a very simple very quick deer hair tutorial to kind of get that kind of perfect Zoo cougar shaped head so basically what I have going on is I have a a rex size for a classic streamer hook and the vise kind of following that zu cougar style and this is basically the back hook of a super jerk so if you want to know how to tie that go find that video maybe I'll throw a link in the description but it's just bucktail EP craft fur brush and then a crafter wing so what you have to understand is basically deer here right this is a alpha hide this is a hairline Devan primo deer hair strip the Primo is just talking about the length this is about 12 inches long by 3 inches wide and this is a really high kind of quality section than it has here but I'm going to show you how to stack this without any tools we're going to do one collar stack which is going to be straight on top and then we're going to do two spins moving forward I'm going to be extremely thorough because this is something I struggled with for a very long time and and hopefully just from watching this you will understand everything and if you don't ask me questions because this is something that you know heads heads are something that I always struggled with you know I could do whatever I wanted for a body but I never knew how to finish the fly so this is this is why I'm showing you so I cut this straight off the hide now this has a lot of crap in this lower section that's basically insulated fibers that aren't going to flare and they have a tendency to cut your thread so you want to just grab the tips you can flick this out you can use a comb you can just pull it out comb this real quick and good to go now I want this collar to kind of be nice and sparse that's one thing I can't really convey to you is the density people use pencil thicknesses all the time if you imagine holding a pencil in between your fingers that's what it should feel like now something I want on this collars I want my tips to be aligned because I want the illusion kind of either pectoral fins or a sweeping back head or gill plates or something big this is a sculpt and imitation so what you can do without a hair stacker as you simply loosely grab these hold them upside down and then you want to just drop them into the palm of your hand and my so my right hand which has the deer hair fibers like I almost have no pressure on these whatsoever and I'm just lightly dropping them regrab lately dropping them and basically I'm just stacking these tips in the palm of my hand so that at the end of the day they are all the same length and you can see I have this nice kind of color line that's indicating that all my tips are the same length now I'm going to measure this off I like this to be about a third of the length of my body going to come up and do a perfectly straight cut super clean super you know kind of straightforward rest this right on top of the hook and you're not going to want this to rotate now the trick to just basically tying with anything is you need to do a loose wrap that has no pressure on it whatsoever and then you apply pressure so the pressure goes straight down vertically instead of pulling across with pressure you can see I get like a rotation on the on the deer hair instead you want to come loose until you are vertical add a little tension loose add a little tension loose and then I'm going to cinch that down while holding that on top of the hood now I like to do a handful of wraps through my deer hair but for durability and it doesn't matter how perfect you did this because we're basically going to come through clean all of this up just use regular scissors if you have hair that's too dense check it out just cut it off it's not a big deal and what I want is I want my hair only on top of the hook you can see I have a little bit of a mess down here below it I'm just going to take my thumb and my forefinger underneath the hook so that it can't spread around and shove my thumb into there you can see I'll get and basically all that does is it pushes the hair from directly on top and it starts to distribute it off to the side so I get hair on the sides now and and not so much straight on top then I like to take my thread loosely through this this kind of clumps and I just put a light thread damn and up on top of those fibers and that will slick that deer hair back and create that nice kind of professional-looking collar now the reason why we cut off our butts and didn't use them is because the deer hair will flare and if you try to incorporate the front into the collar you get this colic and it makes a head separation and you don't get this this nice blend going back from the head into your collar region now I'm going to take two light clumps maybe just under a pencil or pencil again grabbing the tips and combing these out get all that junk out of there now instead of aligning the tips I'm going to align the bases so you take your bases which they should be pretty close because we just cut them off to hide lightly tamp my hand to them while while kind of releasing on my left hand here then I'm just going to come in and cut these tips off so we have no tips whatsoever now this is I think that the trickiest part to this is how to spend deer hair and and so I'm going to hold this in the midpoint on top transfer hands now when you come in and you put that loose wrap completely slack you see all that flat completely loose wrap little bit of tension another loose lab little bit of tension and we'll go for a third one now instead of just pulling right away switch bobbin hands real quick support your hook eye and push down on that hair now give that a straight pull and what you did is that hair so this is going to be my hook shank I'm going to back this up real quick make sure that's still on the right focus point so here's your hooks in it great we just put a whole bunch of deer here on top of that hook shank now if you go to spin net it will kind of rotate as a mass and you'll get most of the hair on one side which looks really bad to get the hair even you would put two and a half loose turns on that and then I pushed my thumb on top of that hair distributed it around the hook shank and then spun it and you get a perfectly even distribution of hair now I'm going to shove that back with my fingers you can use a hair stacker if you want I don't want my head to be that tight I want it to shed water nice and loose the way kind of Kelly designed it and I should have walked you through how to bring your thread up them through but I'll do it on the next one because I got distracted so we got that pushed back everything is looking beautiful I'm going to come in with a second stack an equal amount of hair again I'm going to clean out these butts you don't need any of that kind of shorter insulated fibers stacking the deer here but first against my palm cutting off the tips off again going to rest this right at the midpoint change hands completely loose wrap and I'll check this out I have some trapped fibers in here you want to make your thread really small so that by the time you get around your hook shank your tape to those fibers pull out a little bit go around tight to those fibers go around take to those fibers now again switching hands supporting my hook eye and pushing on that mass it's moving around that hook shank and then I can give that a straight pull and that straight pull is basically going to secure that right tight to the shank so that I don't have any any slack in there pack that back add some tension now when you draw your thread through you don't want to trap any fibers and then the trick is you kind of want to brush this out I like hold them in place and I wiggle my thread through straight up to the hook I and you want you want to pull it straight out straight out and then up well this can be a little tricky but basically you just have to move that hair back from the hook I and that yeah I don't know that that's that's a hard one to get used to you catch that hook guy and we'll throw a half hitch in there and then I'll finger whip on that cool so that is a collar and a fun head and I think the biggest thing on that is what people they don't push that hair around that head and then spin it they try to spin it from the top around and you get a really uneven distribution and that's I think one of the things that is the biggest thing to take away from that once this is on here I kind of like to rough this up make sure it's all kind of nice and flared and crazy I'm going to take this out of the vise rotate my vise out of the way so I like to do all my trimming in my hand not everybody likes to and I like to just hang onto a razor blade loosely this is a well concerned sword let's see if I can get this Oh preset this focal point here so I like to use a Wilkinson Sword single edge razor blade most some fly shops started airing these a hairline started distributing them so you'll see these hopefully more common but you can get them at Walgreens and Rite Aid and stuff like that Walmart and basically holding my fly upside down I do a straight cut right on the bottom take-no-prisoners just go for it kind of bleed that into my my belly here go nice and slow don't go super fast or aggressive I find it easiest if you hold the razor blade at like a 45 degree angle so that as you pull that across it's almost like a draw stroke and it physically cuts the fibers if you just push you can get into trouble because it'll catch its edge and want to dig in but if you hold it at a 45 and then slide it cuts all that hair perfectly nice and clean right on the edge so we have a nice flat bottom that was super easy right did not take much time at all try to show that to you guys no trim in the head obviously if you take too much air away you kind of you know you dig your own graves as soon as you do that I like to follow the angle of the hook I this of the hook down hook I follow that up and just contour the my blade is perfectly flat when I do this just straight up I go straight back to the collar I'm holding my collar down you can you can see that this is my collar I physically trap those fibers with my fingers so that I can't cut them off straight up straight back cut the the head into the collar and then flatten the top of it with side cuts meaning I'm pushing and pulling the blade sideways to the hair now you can kind of just round out the face just a little bit now here's the here's the true secret the secret comes from the scissors and and so you take your scissor and I'm going against the grain you can see mine my hand is behind this head and so when I make this cut it's going to be perfectly straight and true to whatever I set it it I'll show you it's so I flipped the fly around so that again I'm against the grain here going perfectly straight up now this fly well you might want to square up these edges real quick fled me go now that's basically a drunken and disorderly head right there it can kind of butt that fly square nose like that that'll fish just fine right we have this nice slope Ted we had this beautiful collar the head bleeds into the collar there's nothing I mean like this is completely fishable and we haven't spent that much time on it but I like to come in 45 these right angles so I get a nice kind of gentle sweep to my heads again this is all scissor work and now you have some right angles right we cut this head basically at a right angle it's hard to show these right angles but you come in with your razor blade and you just round them out you just 45 that right angle and you get the most perfect Zook of your head every time if you like me just clean that up come from behind clean Anna come from atop clean that up booyah yeah is a perfect zoo cougar head that took me forever to learn how to tie literally years of my life to figure out how to tie a zoo cougar head that came out the same every single time and pushing that hair around has been the biggest hell for me whatsoever it gets the hair completely even and you can hear Kelly talk about it he has a slide ends got a YouTube channel which I highly recommend he goes into some better information more in-depth on selecting hair and stuff like that and really what you should you should definitely listen to it but he talks about this you'll see him he'll hold his hair on top of here before he goes to spin it and he talks about pushing the hair with his material hand and that's where the the missed information comes from he doesn't switch hands like I do and use my right thumb but he pushes it down with his material hand as he begins to draw on it so that it gets this even distribution completely like look I don't know if you can see the density but the density on either side are identical and it's because we push that hair completely around the hook shank and then spun it to get our one clean wrap the thread around that hair so that is a very simple zou cougar variation chartreuse belly I'm probably going to fish this for smallmouth but hopefully that helps I you know I don't know I sometimes when I do videos I don't always know what I'm talking like I hear the words come out of my mouth but they're not predetermined so it's a surprise when they get to watch these videos back but and then you can come on put eyes on here I'll show you that actually I like to use on my do cougar heads I find a four millimeter eye is just about perfect and so I'm going to come in here actually I'm going to go small I got some dragon or I said I think you look cool these are a fly man fishing companies dragon eye it's part of their surface seducer series which is their new kind of foam popper head style stuff and I'm just going to stick these on top come in use the gel such as blue on the hair kind of hold hold it the best and I like to put it kind of if you just look down at the head you can you can very easily visualize where those dabs of super glue should go probably should have done a darker color so let's get a little bit more contrast to it and some I'll show you guys this is a deer creek laser diode torch something like that so you know laser it's a laser and and the the front novel actually has like a little diffuser on it and it kind of breaks up the light pattern over a wider area or you can take it off and you get this crazy extremely powerful curing torch and it's on the cheaper under the spectrum it doesn't cost that much money I think it does awesome I used it in the past probably two weeks now for all my I work and it's been absolutely awesome to work with so check that out come in with some UV diamond fine from Deer Creek and then we'll just absolutely torch that into place cover those edges make sure those eyes can't get pulled up and that that resin soaks into that deer hair and makes a really secure bond that will last a long time so thanks for watching hopefully you learn something there or find something useful or heard a little nugget that's going to change the way you approach the deer here you don't need a hair packer you don't need a stack or you don't need anything to do these these kind of zoo cougar heads you can do it all with your hands and I guess I used to comb so that was helpful but it'll get you these perfect zoo couger heads nice sparse they're not going to absorb a lot of water they're going to shed water in the back cast you have this nice sweeping front angle by matching the the angle of the hook down I you kind of make this little diver head that is going to want to displace a lot of water we kind of have these rough edges on the bottoms that are going to catch and dig and then create a little bit of kind of like belly wobble to it and it's just a super effective pattern so check out Kelly Gallup Zoo cougar and hopefully that head tutorial helps you out and then gets these bugs falling off your vices so thanks for watching and have a good one

Channel: Gunnar Brammer

Views: 116,939

Rating: 4.9066248 out of 5

Keywords: spinning deer hair, stacking deer hair, Fly Tying, Fly Fishing, Articulated Streamer, Trout, Bass, Pike, Streamer, Gunnar Brammer, Brammer’s Custom Flies

Id: kZiCvL49EbM

Length: 19min 15sec (1155 seconds)

Published: Thu May 04 2017