Parachute Adams by Charlie Craven

[Music] hey everybody today we're going to tie a parachute Adams this is one of my very favorite flies my fish this all summer long it's obviously one of those popular flies around and that's probably why you're here trying to find out how to tie it I'm going to tie this one on a tmco 100 s pbl and this sort is my variation on it I do do you make a few alterations to the original pattern to make it float better make it a little more visible and just altogether a prettier fly so I'm starting on a size 16 and the thread I'm going to use is tmco 60 knot well this is a thread you can't get any more they don't make this don't import this thread anymore so the closest thing you can get to it these days is Vitas 14 or 16 ah thread and I'm using it in a dark gray color the exact shade doesn't make a huge difference because it's barely gonna show on the fly at all so I'm going to take this thread I'm gonna start at about 75% then I'm gonna wrap back to tube into the hook so I'm all the way back on the last straight portion of the hook shank and at this point I'm going to take a spade hackle feather and what a spade hackle feather is is they're on the edges the widest part of a dry fly rooster cape rooster neck or rooster cape keep a neck being the same thing just for the record these are at the widest point on the outside edges and these feathers have very long very stiff barbs very little web and what I want to do is I'll get up out of that web kind of discard the bottom half of the feather and I want to stroke these fibers out away from the stem against the grain so they stand up like so you can see I've got nice long sniff barbs to make tails with so I've got here already prepared a brown Spade feather as well as a grizzly Spade feather we're going to use mixed Brown and grizzly there's a couple little tricks to to do in a mixed tail what I'll do here with my brown feather these I'm going to pull out on a size 16 it's probably six or eight fibers and I want to pull them out so their tips become even so I Square their tips up like so I'll peel those off the feather and I'm just going to take and tie those in at the bend of the hook here but just a single turn of thread for the moment then I'm gonna take my grizzly and do the same thing so I've got another clump that's about equal size and I want to I'm just using that first turn of thread there on the bin to hold those tails in place I didn't worry about the length I'm gonna take my grizzly fibers and set them up so that the tails the Grizzly fibers are the same length as the Brown and then I can undo half a turn and then I can tie these in to length and the length that I want is about a shank length long we're pretty good right there so I'm gonna tie toes in right at a shank length long and I'm gonna wrap forward over the butt ends to just sure that 75 or 80% point and then trim those out so now I'm gonna bring my thread all the way up to the hook eye and back again to that about 80% is really the spot I want the wing to go in and for the wing I'm going to use McFly long so McFly line is a heat-treated polypropylene you can see it's got a bit of Sheen to it and that's one of the things I like about it is the conditional polypropylene is very matte finished very flat this has got a little bit of shine or sparkle to it that makes it a lot easier to see on the water the heat treat also keeps this material from matting down on itself which is the other thing I like about it so I'm going to cut i've just got a whole strand there and I've only cut about oh I'd say two inches I don't need very much per fly and this is typically Howell tee this is I'll cut these into two-inch long sections and I'm going to separate these fibers you can use your scissor tips or a wire dubbing brush to do that like so so that they're separated a bit and I'm gonna take for a 16 I'm gonna take about half of the strand and I'd like my wings to be a little on the heavy side they show up better I fish out of a boat a lot so a fly that I have to manage and chase doesn't doesn't show up near as well so I've got a half a strand here so I've divided that strand in half and I'm going to take this strand with my thread hanging right there at that 80% point I'm going to tie it in at the center of its linked with two turns one right on top of the other like so now what I'm going to do is and I'm tying left handed but what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab the front of this wing and pull it toward me and the back end and pull it away from me so if I turn this a bit you can sort of get the idea of what I'm doing you can see when I make that turn that turn of thread becomes diagonal and that's what I'm that's what I'm shooting for there so I'm gonna pull this front end back toward me I'm gonna make two more wraps going from front to back diagonal over the top of those two wraps basically just creating spinner wings there you can see that X is neat and tight and the wraps are one on top of the other so I've got two wraps going one way and two wraps going the other way now if you have problems with parachutes when you tie the hackle in or when you go to post the hackle and your wing is floppy it's because these wraps right here weren't tight so to that end I'm going to make another wrap each direction very tightly over the base of that wing and then I'll pull both wings up above the hook from here what I'm gonna do so I'm going to reach over in my vise I'm gonna pick up my thread and I'm going to come all the way around the base of the wing you can see I came around the far side I've got a reach over device I'm all the way around the base of the wing and I've crawled just a bit up off the base of the wing to bundle that wing into a single bunch and that's just pinning that in place for the moment you can put one more turn in there if you like and then always finish with a wrap around the hook in front of the wing what that's going to do is anchor everything down so that if I lift my thread everything doesn't come which is catastrophic nobody wants that so now I'm ready to tie in my hackles and what I've got here or both a brown and a grizzly feather and the way I've sized these is if you take these feathers and bend them around the base of the wing you can see that those fibers extend right to the base of the tail that's the length that I'm looking for that's how I sized my parachute hackle that happens to be a size 16 feather on a hackle gauge on a size 16 hook so I don't oversize my hackle some guys doing here welcome to do that I like the look of a little cleaner look of the slightly smaller hackle so I've got both the brown and a grizzly here and I've got them stacked on top of each other just as just as if they came off the hide so inside to outside and it doesn't matter which ones on top and I'm gonna strip the base of these two feathers and the length that I want is from the hook I to the base of the lane and then this distance again up the wing I like to strip just a little bit extra bear stem so that I've got some bear stem beyond my tie down when I tie these feathers in so I've got these two feathers and I'm going to catch them behind the hook I here I'm gonna wrap over them right up to the base of the wing now at this point these two feathers are tied in with their insides facing toward the hook so the side that you're looking at there this side here is the insides of the feather and you can see the length of the bear stem that is beyond that that tie down where I've anchored it in front of the wing now what I'm going to do is take both of these feathers and pull them up so that they are now inside toward the wing now if they don't lay perfectly even and I'm not sure if this one will do it or not if it does I'll show you a cool trick to to be able to flip one of those feathers over if they if they do become uneven but we'll just have to see how it goes either way hopefully it happens so that I can show you that because if it doesn't happen it's very easy but more often than not it does happen there's no twist where they don't stay inside to outside but it's not a big deal I'll show you a trick so now that I've got those feathers standing up I'm going to pick up my bobbin and I'm going to invert it now you can see my bobbin tube is pointing down and I'm going to start to wrap up the base of the wing over those bare stems and these wraps are just slightly overlapping as I work up the base you can see the bobbin is upside down and that's the whole trick to wrapping this parachute I'm actually doing this with my material hand I'm not using my thread and I'm using my material hand from the back of the book and I'm got the bobbin completely upside down so the thread is perpendicular to the wing and the bobbin tube is parallel to the wing so I've got those two feathers and I want to work up the base and what I always want to check before I start to work down is that I've still got some bear stem this little bit of bear stem right here at the top of the post I want to make sure that I've got some bear stem beyond my tie down as I make that post once I'm happy that I've got that I'm gonna come back down the post and these wraps are firm you can see I'm maneuvering that way around as I'm pulling on it and as I get closer to the base of the wing I get tighter and tighter let's take it all the way down I'll come around the hook again just to lock everything in and I've got my feathers posted to the wing now I'm going to bring my thread all the way back to the bed and you can see you can sort of tangle the feather and the wing together we're a threat all the way back to the bend in preparation for the body for the abdomen of my parachutes and this is on almost all of them I like to use goose buyouts and what I've got here is a natural candidate goose goose buyout and this is from a greater candidate you can see these buyouts are very long so I'm going to clip out one of these buyouts and in the case of me tying left handed the buyout that I want it comes from the right wing it's the first feather on the right wing and what that does for me is you can see there's a bit of natural curve to these buyouts I want to wrap the feather with its natural curve and being a right feather tied with tying left handed this feather will have the ribbed edge on the forward side of the turn using the smooth black edge to cover that Tomica the non stand up edge body a smooth body but with a dark rib if I wanted a rib body I'd either have to turn this feather over and tight and curve up and wrap it against its natural curve or use a feather from the left wing so if you tie right-handed the answer is you want the feather from the left wing so I'm going to take this feather and one of the things with buyouts that people always seem to run into is they want to come in and take the buyout and tighten just by the very very tip we don't want to do that here that tip is very fine so it's probably going to break that's that's the big issue there but also that tip is so narrow that we've got to make the wraps so close together down the first couple of turns that we really sort of screw up the taper and shape of the body so what I want to do is I want to overlap that tip you can see it's right up to the base of the wing and then I'll capture it with my thread back here at the bend I'll grab forward over the Biot all the way up to the base of the wing now I'm going to take just a bit of zappy gap and when I say a bit I mean it it's just a little shot and I just run it down the top and bottom of the hook if you're going to err err on the thin side with the Zappa gap it uh it's very messy very quickly if you don't so it's just a thin coat and that's gonna help toughen up to spy out bodies are actually really tough feathers is we've got a little zap underneath them so it's a big difference I'm gonna grab the tip of my feather in my hackle pliers and I've got these in a pair jorgensen hackle tweezers you can see how little of that feather I have to get a hold of and I'm gonna stand this feather up I'm gonna make the first turn at the bend now when I do this you can see the stand up edges on the front of that turn my finger in there so what I'm gonna do with the next turn is I want to overlap the back edge of that turn to cover that stand up edge and I'll just keep doing that as I work forward if you also notice there's no taper to the thread body right now but we're going to end up with the tapered body when we get all said and done so I'm going to continue forward overlapping these turns letting the back edge the dark edge of this by ottoman cover that stand up edge that's leading the turn right up to the base of the wing and when I get here I'm right down to the last little bit of Biot so what I'm going to do is I'm going to back my thread up and come around the bow before I release it from the hackle pliers and catch it with a couple of turns then I can release the pliers you can see how that allowed me to tie that off right up at the very base of the feather then I can come in I'm gonna tilt my advice just a bit and trim that stud out well wrap down over focus left there you can see that Biot body is just a beautifully segmented body that's also got a bit of a taper and that comes from the overlap in the feather as we wrap it forward it sort of telescopes up the shank it makes a nicely tapered body so now to finish off the thorax I'm going to take a very small amount of gray superfine dubbing I'm going to apply it to this thin thread so I'm gonna have a very skinny strand of dubbing can always add a bit more but if you've got too much it's hard too hard to manage so I'm gonna take this dubbing and I'm gonna use the bear thread to work up here toward the hook I'm gonna start just behind the hook I don't really leave much of an index point here you can see I can hold the wing and hackle back out of the way I'm going to dub tapering right up to the base of the wing and I'm gonna come behind the wing and I'm gonna cover that tie down from the Biot now I can sort of work back and forth and fill all those voids in and as I run out of double you can see I've got just about a turn of dubbing left here as I run out of dubbing I'm going to come up and come around the base of the wing so this last turn of thread does not end going around the hook but goes around the base of the wing and in my case tying left handed that's a clockwise turn if you're tying right handed that turn should be counterclockwise so now we're ready to wrap the hackle and to wrap the hackle I've I like to use two tmco rotary hackle pliers these guys here they've got a swivel I know the screen is not big enough to show all this but they've got a swivel in the handle so I'm able to wrap these feathers at a right angle and what I want to do here is I want to separate the two feathers first from the wing but at times when I sort of tangled him up I'll be it on purpose with the wing I want to separate those wing strands out so that I don't have them bound up in the hackle and of course because you're all watching I got one really wound up in there you all right so now we've got it cleaned out you can see there's some bear stem there beyond the tie down and these feathers were tied as they sit here but the insides toward the wing right now so what I'm going to do is I'm going to bend them down so the inside is now up this side here is the up side of the feather I'm gonna bring them around the back and at this point I'll attach my hackle hackle pliers this is the inside of the feather here on the top side so it's inside up and I know there's a lot of debate about the right way to do it I realize there's different ways to do it in different guys like different things but all that being said this is the right way to do it if you wrap the hackle with the inside up you're wrapping the feather with the curve up and it clears the path for the next turn so I get a nice clean even hackle a parachute hackle on this fly if I wrap the feather with the hackle fibers pointing down the curve inside of the feather pointing down it's very hard to manage it's not that it can't be done but it's very hard to manage to keep those all lined up nice and neat in the wraps with this method I'm gonna have a clear path as I go down the post so I'm going to start this feather there are these two feathers at the top of the post and you can see the bear stem is gonna come about halfway around before I even start to have hackle fiber stick out I'm going to start at the top of the post and I'm going to pull down tight and I'm gonna put each turn under the last and I'm just gonna make about three turns one underneath the last as I work my way down the post turn that just a bit so you get a little better angle line you can see there I can tighten the feather up a bit and now I'm going to reach over my vise and pick up my thread here I'm going to drop my feathers on the near side of the hook and I'm going to take the thread between the hackle and the dubbing about three turns around the base of the wing now when I get to this point I can release my hackle hackle pliers and my feathers are tied off turn my vise just a bit here you can see my working thread here on the front side now I'm using this in mind I'm in my material hand so my thread is now coming from the base of the wing out over the hook I and to get the thread going around the hook I'm going to drop the thread over the hook I come up on my near side and down again so now I'm going over the top of the hook away from me just as you conventionally would tie a parachute fly a little more light in there you can see where that thread wrap went so once I've got that tied off and my thread is going around the hook I'm going to come in and trim the feathers out and when I do this I'm going to come in from the backside here and trim just as close as I can to that post now you'll almost always have a couple that you miss let me turn this around you can probably see them you can see my trim right here actually with that camera you can really see it you see it better than I can anything that faces below the hook or isn't lined up in the in the parachute collar you can trim out I'm just going to clean that up a bit you can see how parallel to the hook shank that hackle collar is now to whip finish one of the nice things with this method is if I grab this wing I can tilt that hackle back I can come in and it'll actually stay there I can come in with my whip finisher and the work underneath it from the bottom side of the hook and do a three or four turn whip finish and draw up from the bottom to finish my thread trim my thread out you can see we've got a beautiful hackle collar there now the length of the wing is sort of up to you most parachutes that you buy have a much shorter wing than I like now I've repositioned the fly on the screen so that you can see my move to trim it what I'm going to do is I'm just going to turn the fly upside down where I can get a hold of the wing here I'm gonna trim it about a shank length long now that being said having taught this fly in fly tying classes for years when you trim a wing to length you almost always cut it too short in the case of a fly like an atom's where you've got to tie the wings into length you'll almost always tie them too long so when you're trimming a wing you almost always trim it too short so keep that in mind when you trim it off that you want to arrow a little on the long side you can always make it a little shorter but you can't make it grow back so that's the move to trim the wing here's our finished wing length and you can see it's a shank length long it's a tall wing and the reason I like that wing tall is it really shows up much better on the water then if you were to cut that down much shorter that again this is one of those things that I've always said you know I can trim the wing shorter on the water if I need to but I'll leave it long just in case I decide that's what I want and in the case of every instance I've never once have I trimmed that wing shorter so a whole shank length long on the wing and you can see especially with this camera view we've got a really clean good view of this how neat those hackle wraps line up as they come down the post you know both sides all the way around you can see are a neatly segmented body with that by up the thing I like about the Biot these buyouts are not necessarily inherently buoyant but what by not to do that dubbing doesn't is they don't absorb water or fish line and all I do when I go fishing is catch piles and piles of fish so something that doesn't absorb that fish line that I don't have to constantly dry the fly out makes a huge difference in the amount of fish I catch so if you want to catch piles and piles of fish every day that's how you do a parachute Adams body now the final step on a parachute and this is something I do on all of them so I'm going to take and turn the fly to its side I'm going to take some thin heads net I'm gonna put a drop right there on the hackle and hopefully this will show well you can see it lead down right into the base of the post now you don't want so much that it'll bleed into the dubbing but you can see how that sort are just capillary actions right down into the into the stem of the feather and that will go into the base of the post into the base of the wing post and harden up those thread wraps and kind of lock everything in once that's all dry that is a solid solid wing and you'd say I put a little extra on there it's starting to sink into the dubbing but you get the idea to put a little extra on there to to make it obvious and that is our finished parachute Adams that's about as good a fly as it gets that is a visible very durable very buoyant fish-catching machine tie some up now you know how like I say there's lots of lots other ways to do it and famous last words they're all wrong do it this way thanks for watching okay I realize that I forgot to show you the trick in the case that your two feathers don't stay aligned inside to outside so what I've done here is I've whipped up another one real quick and I've tied these two feathers in on purpose incorrectly so that feather is has got the outside of the feather facing you the brown feather and the Grizzly feather has got the inside of the feather facing you so those two feathers are lined up the wrong way we want them both to line up inside up as I bend them around the parachute post so what I want to do my brown feather I can fairly easily come around and end up with the inside up so that feathers gonna be managed just fine the Grizzly feather is going to cause us some trouble and here's the here's the trick to this what I want to do is take the Grizzly feather and you can see that's inside toward you and I will fold it so that it comes around inside up once I've got that then I could take my brown feather and arrange it along the inside as well I'll stack those two feathers right on top of each other like so and pull tight on you can see how I've just folded those stems so they line up correctly again it's just a matter of how you position those now I'll show you what the actual wrap looks like so rather than treat these as one unit I'm going to bring my brown feather around I bring my grizzly feather down under it and then cup them together so now I've got the insides facing up the side that you're seeing there they're still kind of quartering this is the outside of the feather on this side on both of them so just folded those to go the right direction I'll grab them in my hackle pliers and I'll start my turn here at the top of the post one turn under the last three turns pull everything tight take up my thread on the far side of the hook I want to come under all that Apple about three turns you come down over the hook I up over the hook I and I can come in and trim my feathers out here on my near side so there's your trick to turn feathers that aren't go in the right direction to feathers that are going the right direction because that just occasionally happens the stems of the feathers aren't as consistent as we'd like to believe all the time so it's yeah you can kind of clean that up a bit and we've got insight up on both of those feathers so there's your trick now you know all of them have fun [Music]

Channel: Charlie's Fly Box

Views: 93,583

Keywords: charlies fly box, charlie craven, fly shop, fly shop small, small business, charlie fan boy, umpqua signature designers, umpqua feather merchants, tied to the water, fly fisherman magazine, dyna king vise, dr slick tools, whiting farms, solarez fly tying, natures spirit fly tying, hareline dubbin, wapsi fly, style matters, tiemco hooks, fly tying addict, fly tying junkie, fly tying porn, fly fishing junkie, fly fishing addict, fly tying, fly fishing

Id: uWmDuslKnOU

Length: 27min 7sec (1627 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 21 2019