Marc Pettijean has come up with some techniques and tools for working with the barbs only of CDC and Marabou, and just about any other fiber that you can think of. It's based on his "Magic Tool," but you can make a similar thing with a block of foam.
Basically, you fold the feather and clamp the barbs with a bulldog clip. Split your flat waxed thread and insert the feather into the split (easier than a dubbing loop); spin the thread using the bobbin, and you get a chenille that you can wrap on the hook. The advantage to this is that you can put several feathers together to get variagated colors, and you don't have to work with the stiff stem. Can work on very small hooks. There is an article in Fly Fisherman, and if you go to their website www.flyfisherman.com/toc, you'll find some videos showing how the technique works. I made a very colorful leach last night using my homemade setup, and it's really cool the way it works. --- Steve, In Maryland ____________________________________________________________ Get advanced SPAM filtering on Webmail or POP Mail ... Get Lycos Mail! http://login.mail.lycos.com/r/referral?aid=27005
