Description

Join Bennett-Watt and learn how to make new twists on old fishing fly patterns, with focus on the Epoxy Zonker part 4/4.

Transcript

New Twists on Old Fishing Fly Patterns - Epoxy Zonker Part 4/4 Now you can see we have kind of area of the head of the fly and kind of back to where the gills would be on your bait fish. Now we’re going to apply the eyes and I usually use my needle to kind of assist in pulling these eyes off the paper. That one, it came off with the paper stuck to it. We’ll try another one here to go. And then, we’ll kind of take a look at the head of the fly; just lay that eye down where we want it. Press it and pull the needle out. It takes a little bit easier to position that eyeball and then we’ll do the other side. Pretty much the same gauging, and we want our eye need to be kind of right in the center towards the top and pull out our needle. Give it a little extra push. And now we’re ready to epoxy the head of the fly. And right before we get started with the epoxy, we’re going to trim the Zonker strip to our proper length, and I usually again use that kind of double the length of the fly so about a quarter inch off. And the best way to finish the end of the Zonker strip is to cut it, add a little bit of the point till we make the first cut. And you get to try and slip in underneath the hair so that you don’t cut much of the hair off there like I just did but that’s not too bad. We’re going to tint the head if the fly with our pin that we used earlier. In this case, I’ve got an olive pen just to darken the top of it a little bit. All you really need to do is just kind of touch the thread with the tip of the pen, and it will pick up the ink and kind of pull it down through. I’ll just pick the one little bit up front that looks pretty good. And again we’ll mix our epoxy. And what I usually do to put the epoxy on the head of the fly, put at dab on top of each of the eyeball so then you’ll know you got those pretty well covered. And then, I will just kind of work that epoxy around the head of the fly to make sure everything gets covered. And make sure you get clear to the back of the thread to seal it and cover it a little bit more. In this process, it takes a little bit of practice. But the epoxy is very forgiving material, it flows out on its own or I guess what’s called self-leveling, so it’s easy to come up with a very nice looking head without a whole lot of effort. The excess run down to the bottom, I’m just going to pick it up on our mixing stick. And then again we’re going to go through the process of rotating this fly for approximately five minutes until it hardens. And there you have it, the Epoxy Zonker.