Tying With Quills - New England On The Fly

I’ve been getting quite a few e-mails and phone calls lately about problems tiers are having with cracked and split quills. There are a lot of remedies being used that I’m afraid are totally unnecessary and will, in fact, cause even more damage to the quills. Some of these remedies involve soaking quills in water overnight, saturating them insome kind of hair-treatment product, or soaking them in glycerin. Don’t do any of these! If you saturate a quill with anything that doesn’t evaporate, you are filling up all the tiny cells in the quill that you need to absorb fly flotant. And if the product you apply dissolves in water, when you fish it your fly will actually absorb water and sink. I soak my quills in water for about five to 10 minutes, right before I begin to tie with them.

I use about a pound of quills a year, and bleach and dye them myself after using a 50/50 solution of Clorox and hot tap water to “burn” the feather fibers from the quill. I can tell you that only about one in 30 or 40 quills cracks or splits on me. The Clorox procedure is a tricky one; if you want to try it as an alternative to removing the fibers by hand, I recommend that you first consult my book, Dying and Bleaching Natural Fly Tying Materials (New York: The Lyons Press). The book contains a chapter that explains in detail how to prepare your own quills.

The feathers you buy are handled many times before you get them, and there will always be some that are cracked or split. Strung Chinese rooster neck hackle is still the best for stripping because of the larger diameter of the quills.

If you are buying prepared quills remember that, because they are produced in bulk quantities, quality control can be a problem. And if you leave the feathers in a Clorox-and-water solution for only a few seconds too long, the quills will begin to weaken and they will crack when you use them. A dye bath that is too hot will also weaken the quills.

When tying in the quill, cut the tip off at a point where its diameter is equal to the hook shank and tailing butts and tie it in by the small end, then wrap it forward to form the body.
—A.K.

Check out A.K.’s fly-tying videos, based on his popular books (unless noted, all times are 60 minutes; prices $19.95): Tying Dry Flies (120 minutes; $29.95); Tying BWOs; Tying Caddis & Midges; Tying Callibaetis & Green Drakes; Tying Nymphs & Wets; Tying Terrestrials; Basic Fresh Water Streamer Tying (available soon; 120 minutes; $29.95); Basic Salt Water Tying (available soon; 120 minutes; $29.95); Tying Gordons, Hendricksons, March Browns & Pale Evening Duns (available soon); Tying PMDs, Red Quills, Tricos and Paraleptophlebias (available soon); Techniques for Tying Tiny Dry Flies (available soon).