Angel hair

[Bruce Slightom]

I have been useing Angel Hair for under wings and wings but I find that the material is hard to manage. It seens that I waste a great amount of material. When I cut it the remaining strands they go every where and are not controlable. I have tries getting it wet to no availe. I love the way it looks in the water and do not know if I am missing something or if that is just the nature of the beast. Bruce

[David Lee]

Nature of the beast , I'd say .

I have a bunch of the stuff , but don't use it often because of waste - seems I can't cut a hank without losing a bunch of it .

I mostly chop it up and mix it w/ dubbing . it mixes well with Angora Goat or Mohair for some neat Leeches and Dragonfly nymphs .

David

[Jasonh]

Bruce i am also using angel hair for wingd and under wings on many of my steelhead flies and i have had some problem with that. The stuff is just so darn cool and efective that i still use it.

Jason Hartwick

[Moose]

Bunches up on the hank, end up wasting a lot of it, doesn't stack, makes a mess on the tying table, gets stuck in the cats teeth, but great stuff! Be glad you have it! Especially the ice (or is it electric?) colors that almost glow under water.

[PaulC]

Doug's bugs makes a more manageable version I've found. Its less kinky and more straight lending itself a bit better to the larger baja style bait patterns.
Here's a side by side comparison of doug's bugs version and the more angler's choice stuff. Doug's bugs material is more like a real thin flashabou and easier to deal with.


No...I am not a rep and will not be emailing sales pitches Just reporting my trials at the vise. I just started using the stuff for baja bucktail patterns this spring and the angler's choice stuff drove me nuts trying to make the baitfish not look like it had an afro.
Doug's Bugs also make some cool stuff called electra flash which I've been using in place of krystal flash. Way more holographic and shiny for murky conditions.

-Paul

[PaulC]

Carl,
Good to know. I was ordering from a website and got two packages of angel hair both labelled as such, with radically different consistency and workability. With different vendor tags, the assumption was variation due to vendor. Didn't know they all come from the same origin.
-Paul

[Jgoding]

HI Bruce,

I would recommend trying awesome hair. It is almost exactly the same material but more is easily managed. I just started tying flies with this stuff and it looks great to me, especially when wet. It has the same characteristics but isn't as brittle.

Jeff

[Bill Kiene semi-retired]

All this is very confusing even to us in the fly shops. Many material houses name the stuff what ever they like and we have to get samples to see what it really is for sure.

I will be looking at all this stuff. I will look for "awesome hair" too.

Thanks for all the good feed back.

Any time you think you find a good new material let me/us know.

Thanks.

[StevenOjai]

Don Ordes of Casper, Wyoming introduced Awesome Hair to me about two years ago. He said that Mike Martinek was marketing the material. It comes in a number of colors and is a finely textured mylar. I know of a few flyshops that sell the material but would prefer not to introduce a competitor flyshop to this forum. The hyperlink is to a shad pattern I tied with the material.

http://stevenojai.tripod.com/shad.htm

Steve Schalla

[flirodr]

Thought I would chime in to enlighten those who are misinformed. Hedron is not a manufacturer. Many of the flash products, such as Flashabou, Angel Hair or Krystal Flash are manufactured for other industries. These materials are made from a film that is slit. Some of the highest quality slit films come out of Japan.

Angel hair is actually a US made product. The film is made by a US company and the slitting is done by a different US company. They produce various sizes of slit films. There are numerous companies in the fly fishing industry that are buying the same product we call Angel Hair. The way it is handled and packaged is different. We take great pains to package the product so it is easy to handle and minimize waste.

In addition, we have found a way to dye the Angel Hair so it does not curl and become brittle. These colors you will not see produced by anyone except Doug's Bugs.

Hope this helps.

Doug