When you tie your own flies you make a lot of knots. You need to keep the fly materials and thread from coming unwound from the hook and the most appropriate knot for the job is the half-hitch. But fishing flies are tiny, and you need to place the knots in exactly the right place as you tie the fly. It’s really hard to tie a tiny knot with your fingers and place it precisely. You need a half hitch tool. Let’s make one!
What is a half hitch tool?
Imagine a sharpened wooden pencil with a hole where the lead should be. That’s a half hitch tool. With a simple flick of the wrist, you can use the conical end to form a loop in your thread. Then the hole allows you to slide the tool over the hook shank until the end is right where you want the knot to be. You give the thread a tug, and the loop slides off the conical end and into place. Presto, a half hitch!
I wanted a light, handy one with different sized holes on each end. The smaller hole gives better precision on small flies, and the bigger hole lets me work on bigger flies with the same tool. I didn’t want a round tool that would roll around, so I went with hexagonal, like a pencil.
This will be a pretty simple lathe project, so let’s get started!
Setting Up
The only tricky thing we need to do is set up the angle for the ends. I went with a 30 degree included angle for the end. That means I need to cut the point at a 15 degree angle to the axis of the lathe. Since it’s a short section, I can use the lathe’s compound feed.
I first loosen the pivot screws for the compound.
I set 15 degrees on my protractor and tightened the knob to lock the angle.
And used that to adjust the angle of the compound feed.
I tightened the pivot bolts, of course.
Now, as I turn the compound feed, the cutting tool will travel forward at a 15 degree angle to the spinning work piece. This will result in a 30 degree point on the piece.
Facing and Drilling
Before we get to cutting the taper, we need to attend to some other things. First, we need to face the piece, to make the end flat and square. Once it’s square, we can drill the hole in the end.
I used the cross-slide feed to push the tool across the face of the part to smooth and flatten it. A couple passes cleaned it right up.
This was the only in-focus picture I had of the drilling process. I used a spotting drill to start the hole, which makes the small drill that follows far less prone to wandering.
Then I drilled the small hole about an inch deep. It just needs to be deeper than a fishhook is long.
Once that was done, it was time to cut the taper.
Cutting the Taper
I used the cross-slide feed to set the cutting depth, and the compound feed to move the tool toward the lathe chuck. The tip of the tool thus described a 15 degree angle to the axis of the spinning part. As you can see, a taper is forming.
After a few more passes, the face is removed and the angle meets the hole. This end is done!
I went through the same operations on the other end. It looked just like the first end except the hole was bigger.
Presto! One half hitch tool!
I used a round-nose lathe tool to cut a channel in the end with the bigger hole, just to make it easy to see which end is which.
Then I polished it up a bit. Job done!
You can read more about fly tying tools here.
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