Hooks
Posted: Thu Nov 11, 2010 7:32 am
This is taken from an inteview found here: http://www.flytyer.com/index.php?Itemid ... &task=view
“We discovered that with flies tied on hooks with down-turned eyes, especially regular wet-fly and nymph hooks, that the flies drift through the water correctly as long as there’s no drag on the line. But, when you begin putting a little drag on the line, these flies will flip over. When a fly is tied on a hook with an eye that is turned up, however, it always rides in the correct position.”
True or false - I don't know.
This was also interesting:
"A Little-Known Bit of Fly-Tying History
At the end of the hour, Grahame and I began discussing some of the things he has learned about the history of hooks. He’s discovered some things quite by accident. Case is point: How did Allcocks and the other old English hook companies determine hook sizes?
“Well, that’s another thing that’s so interesting,” Grahame said. “Very few people really understand hook sizing. The old Redditch hook chart sized hooks by the length of the shank, not the width of the gap. In other words, the size of the hook was determined by the length of the shank starting from behind the eye to the beginning of the bend; the width of the gap had nothing to do with it. The way the older hook manufacturers determined the size of the gap, and the way Vince does it, is to make a gap that best matches the length of the hook shank. In other words, they tried to create a hook gap that just seemed to have the right proportions for the length of the shank.
“Being an engineer, things like this interest me. So, some years ago I spent a lot of time measuring the gaps of different hooks. I was trying to find if there was some commonality in gap sizes between different styles of hooks. I measured the gaps of hundreds of hooks, but couldn’t find a unit of measurement that worked. I tried thirtyseconds of an inch, sixty-fourths of an inch; I even measured gaps to the hundredths of an inch. But absolutely none of these measurements worked. Then, one day, I tried millimeters. Sure enough, the gaps of all of those old English hooks were based on millimeters. Remember, many of those folks also worked in the needle industry, and the length of all of their needles were measured in millimeters. It was only natural that they would use this unit of measurement in manufacturing hooks. That’s another one of those little historic facts you’ll uncover when you start studying these things.”
dd
“We discovered that with flies tied on hooks with down-turned eyes, especially regular wet-fly and nymph hooks, that the flies drift through the water correctly as long as there’s no drag on the line. But, when you begin putting a little drag on the line, these flies will flip over. When a fly is tied on a hook with an eye that is turned up, however, it always rides in the correct position.”
True or false - I don't know.
This was also interesting:
"A Little-Known Bit of Fly-Tying History
At the end of the hour, Grahame and I began discussing some of the things he has learned about the history of hooks. He’s discovered some things quite by accident. Case is point: How did Allcocks and the other old English hook companies determine hook sizes?
“Well, that’s another thing that’s so interesting,” Grahame said. “Very few people really understand hook sizing. The old Redditch hook chart sized hooks by the length of the shank, not the width of the gap. In other words, the size of the hook was determined by the length of the shank starting from behind the eye to the beginning of the bend; the width of the gap had nothing to do with it. The way the older hook manufacturers determined the size of the gap, and the way Vince does it, is to make a gap that best matches the length of the hook shank. In other words, they tried to create a hook gap that just seemed to have the right proportions for the length of the shank.
“Being an engineer, things like this interest me. So, some years ago I spent a lot of time measuring the gaps of different hooks. I was trying to find if there was some commonality in gap sizes between different styles of hooks. I measured the gaps of hundreds of hooks, but couldn’t find a unit of measurement that worked. I tried thirtyseconds of an inch, sixty-fourths of an inch; I even measured gaps to the hundredths of an inch. But absolutely none of these measurements worked. Then, one day, I tried millimeters. Sure enough, the gaps of all of those old English hooks were based on millimeters. Remember, many of those folks also worked in the needle industry, and the length of all of their needles were measured in millimeters. It was only natural that they would use this unit of measurement in manufacturing hooks. That’s another one of those little historic facts you’ll uncover when you start studying these things.”
dd
