Martyn White | Thursday, 12 June 2025
A mixed week for me. A bit fishing, a bit of tying and back at hospital stretching my Japanese ability with stuff I'm not even sure how to say in English.
I've cleared my pneumonia, but there's still a load of lungy stuff going on which is really getting in the way of mountains and fishing. But it has left me more time for tying and other things. I'm continuing to work on my hair bugs, especially trying to get them nice and tight in smaller sizes. For me this seems mainly to be an issue of judging the size of the clumps of hair correctly - I find it tricky to get a nice balance on sizes under a 6. It's easy to overfill the hook with the first couple of stacks and struggle with the last third. Unfortunately it's also easy to over compensate and then have a frog with an extra set of spots. Not a big deal, but consistency makes things easier and faster.
I've also been making some foam jobs for popper dropper rigs (POD) . I decided to go for a kind of old fashioned look on them and I'm quite happy with how they turned out. I briefly considered adding loops or tippet rings to the bend on them but changed my mind. I used styrofoam bodies, acrylic paint and epoxy for these. Regardless of what I've seen written or in videos about making bugs, epoxy and acrylic are in my opinion still far and away the best options;
Superglue is useless most of the time. With slit bodies,it will let go, sometimes before a fish has even become involved. It'll do for glueing heads where the hook goes through the foam and can't fall off, but that's it. Epoxy won't.
Yellowing is the main complaint about epoxy, but isn't really a problem with longer cure resins. Provided you. Mix it with and on inert material (no post it pads and toothpicks) anything that takes more than an hour to fully go off won't yellow quicker than you can use the fly if you actually go fishing. The best option for the top coat, I think, is flex coat or rod builder's epoxy. Again, the longer the cure the better. 12 hour flex coat will last for years without yellowing or cracking.
There are different painting options too, but a lot of them will run or react with the foam. Nail polish is decent for painting bugs, but it's hard to get the range of intense colours acrylic comes in, particularly the fluorescent ones. Just hit a hobby shop and see. I usually use Tamiya or Mr colour paints, the wee pots are cheap and plenty for loads of bugs.
Copic, which is popular will run or bleed with essentially every top coat and they're transparent colours so need some other base coat probably. - I do use copic on occasion for soft foam, but it needs to be covered with a water based clearcoat to stop the colour just washing off, alternatively it can be used over foil and epoxied to good effect if you don't want to have a colour pattern. While I'm on the topic of copic, don't use it for colouring things like hair or ultra suede (Cohen's creatures etc. see the frog) because regardless of what the influences say, it'll just wash out while fishing. I'm always getting asked about it online, and when I say, that they aren't waterproof-which Copic will also tell you- I'm met with replies like " but X says they're the best" surprisingly often, wierd how people cling to that nonsense when their own expeience tells them otherise. Use sharpies or other waterproof pens.. Obviously.
