How and why? Link naar de nederlandse pagina
One of the techniques in fly tying is making a brush, you place material in a loop and spin it up so that you get a brush made of hair or a cone of, for example dubbing. You can simply make the loop from tyingthread for simple brushes, but if you want to make larger or more complex brushes, a dubbing block or brush table is often used in combination with stainless steel or copper wire. Since the development of my sightplate, I have been working intensively with this technique and have come across a new thread that appears to be very suitable for this technique.
The brush tables vary from extensive tables with a hand wheel or accudrill to a simple plate with a screw on which you can make a loop of copper or steel wire. Just look on YouTube to see how such a table works and, if you are a little handy, how you might make one yourself.
I think one of the great advantages of placing tyingmaterials in a brush is that it creates a lot of volume with relatively little material. Because all the material is placed perpendicular to the thread and then spun, it forms a brush with fibers that have a strong tendency to protrude outwards, the effect is very similar to the ‘hollow tying’ method. By playing with short and long fibers you can influence the properties of the brush. Short fibers provide a stiffer brush, longer fibers have a greater tendency to hang and also move better, just think of a haircut. Long or short hair, thick or thin, it all behaves differently.
I tie one of my favorite streamers with craftfur and flash, almost everything is 1 brush. The position where you place the material in the brush and the length of the fibers have a major influence on the final profile of your streamer. I like craftfur because it is easy to use in a brush, it does not tend to get tangled because it is smooth and supple. In addition, it moves fantastically in the water, it waves just like a zonker strip. Best craftfur is provided by Pike Monkey in my opinion, a nice full patch with long fibers. When you start making brushes I will advise you to get these fibers.
Copper or stainless wire?
To make brushes, most flytyers use stainless steel wire, it is slightly stronger than copper and is available from UNI as dubbing brush wire in different diameters. In addition, copper wire is widely available in various diameters and colors.
Commercially made brushes are mainly made of stainless steel wire, with many differences. The best ones I came across were made from a loop of stainless steel with some thinner stainless steel wires woven through it. The worst were made of a loop of stainless steel wire that was not wound tightly, causing the material in the brush to be very loose.
I personally prefer copper and I think this is due to my background in metal. As a result, I have developed a great sense of materials and I think the properties of copper are better than those of stainless steel for clamping materials. Copper has a very ‘clamping’ effect, stainless steel also has less of this. In addition, copper is relatively soft, which means it forms better and has less tendency to spring back. I just don’t like the color of copper and therefore always buy silver-plated copper wire.
I think copper breaks a little faster than a stainless steel wire of the same thickness, but this really depends on your experience. You have to work with this to gain experience and that thread will simply break during experimentation, but over time you will get a feel for it and you will keep it intact.
Both copper and stainless steel are slippery wires and the material has a tendency to slip, especially when too much material is placed between the wires. Waxing helps enormously with this, the wax ensures that the thread becomes a bit sticky, which provides much more grip on the material that is placed between it.
I use relatively thin copper wire (0.2-0.3mm) and make sparse brushes so that you get a transparent effect in your streamer. Other people I spoke about this subject tie thicker brushes and generally use thick stainless steel wires. Thicker wire is better able to spin a larger amount of material into a brush.
Habu silk stainless steel.
The Japanese manufacturer Habu Textiles supplies all kinds of yarn and exclusive fibers for handicrafts and thread spinning. Habu supplies a wire ‘Habu silk stainless steel’ that I use with very good results to make my brushes. It is a delicate silk thread with a very thin stainless steel wire (0.05mm) woven into it that provides a certain memory in the thread. The product in which you process the wire can be modeled, you can shape it.
This makes it extremely suitable to make brushes, with the biggest advantage over copper and stainless steel being that it is much more flexible and it is also stronger when you spin it. I’ve never broken it while working on the brush. The silk thread is also very receptive to wax and has a lot of grip on the material you place in the loop. It is available in various colors on a large spool and in addition to silk there is also a linen, wool and a bamboo variant.
In addition, the wire is less heavy than the copper wire I use and because the wire has more volume than the copper or stainless steel wire, it sinks much less quickly. I almost never add weight to my streamers and tie them as lightly as possible and with this thread from Habu the streamer sinks even slower and hoovers better in the water. Especially when you use thick stainless steel or copper wire, the weight is a major advantage of Habu silk.
The limit of the possibilities of the Habu wire is reached when you place a large amount of material in the loop or use really long fibers for large brushes. If this has to be brushed out firmly with a comb or dogbrush, the wire does not have enough strength to hold everything in place. I use Habu for small to medium-sized brushes.
My experiences:
It takes quite some time to get to grips with making a good brush. Invest in this by practicing with different materials and start by working sparsly. As you gain more experience, you will know which materials are easy to use, and which ones require you to be more careful with the amount, thickness or length of the fibers that you want to use in the brush.
What I really like is that you can give your streamer a lot of shape with a brush by working with short (short = stiffer) fibers in certain zones so that you get a thicker body on the hook where this part is wound. I like to do this with red craft fur that will shine through the streamer and gives a nice red glow behind the head, just like the gills and it makes for a nice thick head. If you do this with thicker or stiffer material such as kanekalon, it sometimes extends too far and the short points really protrude through the streamer. Just experiment!!
And then the Habu thread, what can I say about that? I always tied with 0.3mm copper wire until early 2024 when I came across Habu’s silk wire and started tying with it. To make a good comparison, I also started tying with 0.15mm stainless steel wire, the medium stainless steel wire from Uni products. Actually, all these threads are good for making brushes and the differences are small, ultimately you as a tyer create the final quality of the brush.
I made a number of brushes and took detailed photos of them to look for the differences. If you look closely at the photos, you will not notice much at first, but if you look at them more carefully and if you make brushes with the various threads, you will notice that Habu’s silk thread consistently performs slightly better. I think it is a result of a number of properties that make it work easier and also have a better grip on the material in the loop.
Both copper and stainless steel are hard materials and if you tie a brittle material such as deer hair or bucktail into a loop and wind it tightly, the hair can break at a certain point. Also, when tying in the brush, if you constantly rub all the fibers backwards, the fibers can break. Habu silk is a soft thread that does not tend to cut into the material, it actually fills the space very well around the materials in the loop.
If you look closely at the macro photo of the brushes, you will see that there are sometimes small openings in the stainless steel brushes, in the core. This is because the wire is stiff and these small spaces can cause fibers to become loose. Copper has this property slightly less, it is better able to flex and form in the spaces, hence my preference for copper all along.
The Habu silk has a tendency to fit completely into the spaces created during spinning and will optimally support the fibers placed in the loop. The material tied in is less likely to become tangled during spinning and is less likely to shift in the thread because the Habu silk has more grip. The macro photos show that the core of the brushes made with Habu silk are wrapped very tightly!
Copper, stainless steel and Habu silk all have a tendency to twist back a number of turns when you stop spinning the brush. When turning back, small spaces will occur with stainless steel, less space with copper and with Habu’s silk thread nothing at all, the silk fills the spaces beautifull.
Of course both metal wires are stiff. This property is easy to work with, but the Habu wire, on the other hand, is flexible like a normal wire. There is a very thin stainless steel wire woven into it that gives the wire memory, but this adds almost no stiffness to the wire. This makes it work very pleasantly. Take a knife or old scissors to cut the wire.
When you spin a brush tightly, there comes a time when you reach the limit and the wire will break, that is the case with all wires, but what strikes me is that Habu silk is very strong when it is twisted compared to thin copper. or stainless steel. You can easily break a single strand, just like copper and stainless steel, but the strength of the brush that is formed is very good! I have never broken the silk thread while tying and can exert more force on it than on copper and stainless steel.
Pros and cons:
– light
– does not cut into material
– supple
– strong
– tight spinning
– more grip on material / less loose fibers
– small to middle sized brushes
All these small advantages ensure that it is a wonderful thread to work with and that results in a slightly better endresult. Use Google to find a supplier in your area, in the Netherlands it is available from Hawar. It is not widely available, but if you find a shop that offers it, be sure to look further in the store because this yarn is mainly used by creative people who use it in textile objects!!
My experiences are based on making brushes sparsly and I immediately use on the hook, although it is also possible to cut off the brush and use it later. I make my brushes on the sightplate which I designed and which can be used as a brushtable. the sightplate is a fantastic expansion of your vice and comes with toolbar, needle and dubbingtwister.
Watch the instructievideo or have a look in the webshop.
I spoke Dennis Sanders (Bigstreamers) on the phone about this subject and he told he wouldn´t use the Habu thread to make his brushes.
He mainly makes a stock of thick full brushes for larger streamers and uses the medium thick Uni stainless steel wire in which mainly nayat with bucktail and flash is processed. When you make a number of these brushes to use later, the medium stainless steel wire from Uni keeps the brush in good shape and the material remains well contained. Habu silk has less memory and grip to store these types of full brushes for a longer period of time, which still causes loose strands.
Nayat is a fantastic material to use for your streamers, combine it with bucktail to create some more volume, nayat has beautiful long hair up to 20cm and a lot of movement.
Have a look at the site of Bigstreamers for the best nayat, working with nayat will take some practise, watch this video for the right workflow. Dennis sent me some large nayat brushes used for big pikestreamers and they were awesome, the best I have seen but the amount of fibers to keep in place is to big for the Habu thread, therefore he uses stainless wire.
During a tying session at Hans Bock (Hooked On Fly Fishing) we were discussing and working the Habu threads together with Mark Roovers. Both were surprised and agreed with me about the possibilities of these threads.
I received the message from Flor van Bijlen that he (and some others) are switching from 0.3mm nickel wire to Habu silk, simply a super wire!
Finally: I only tie my brushes with habu thread and recently ordered another version, the ‘Habu raw silk wrapped stainless steel’. This wire is very thin and has a silk core wrapped with a very thin stainless steel wire. It is fragile and breaks much more easily, but is very suitable for making brushes from finer materials. If you like experimenting and a fine tying technique, then this raw thread is definitely worth it. This wire is suitable for making brushes for dry flies, it is so thin you can tie flies with it!
To be clear, I do not sell these wires nor do I derive any commercial benefit from the sale of these threads.
Google for: Habu silk stainless steel normal variant
Google for: Habu raw silk wrapped stainless steel very thin variant
