Tuesday 30 November 2010

My Inspired Project


I've been tying flies for almost 2 years now and have been using a rotary style vice bought off eBay for about £15. To be honest it has served me well and has helped produce many flies in that time, but there are one or two things that annoyed me with the design and the ergonomics of it.


Fly tying is a hobby that is destined to be a part of my life for the foreseeable future so I'd planned to use my visit to this years BFFI to have a close look at a couple of the vices I'd chosen to be potential candidates for replacing the old model.

To be honest I was impressed with what I saw and found it hard to walk away without a purchase but I think that looking at the vices gave me the realisation that for someone that has spent his whole working life involved in engineering then I should really try and come up with my own creation.

Its a thought I had considered before but the awareness of the amount of time that such a project would take had led me to the route of considering a purchase rather than making my own.

Anyway...after plenty of thought and scribbled sketches and a few weeks of working 'after hours' on the vice I came up with a prototype which was later tweaked to produce the finished product. I have given it some quite extensive testing over the last week and I am finding it a joy to use.


Regardless of how happy I am with the vice I have to report that the quality of my flies has unfortunately remained at the same standard, but I'm sure to enjoy the practising that little bit more.

                 A few of the recent flies tied on the new vice

8 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. Nice vice Mick looks the business. Top quality flies to match. Any chance of going into mass production on the vice !!?
    Cheers
    Phil

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  3. Wow thats a really good looking vice Mick!! Please let me know if you going to produce more of that vice.

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  4. That's a stunning bit of workmanship!

    I thought I would drop you line to let you know that we very much enjoyed reading your blog. So much so that we decided to include it in a review of fly fishing blogs that we have published on our website here.

    http://www.fishtec.co.uk/blog/

    The Fishtec blog has a wide readership so we hope that what we've written will inspire people to visit your blog...

    Please do let us know if there's anything we've got wrong and we'll change it.

    Yours,

    Robin Falvey
    The Fishtec Blog Team
    fishtecblog@gmail.com

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  5. Thanks for the comments...it was really a labour of love so no plans to put into production I'm afraid.

    Nice to see Fishtec showing recognition for some of our blogs, would be nice to see them firmly fixed to the right hand side of the home page so they don't dissapear into the archives!

    Mick.

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  6. Nice looking vice and flies. Will follow this blog now.
    Haapy tying!
    Colin aka Baslowfisher
    http://www.baslowfisher.blogspot.com/

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  7. Mick, I think you are very modest as those flies look pretty good to me! I think they'll take some fish - especially the top 2!

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  8. Hi, I looked on your blog and I like it very much, keep up the good work !!!

    Doru
    http://musteartificiale.blogspot.com

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