Choo Choo, happy you help you where I can. It's an addiction, so beware
More like hunting the flats for permit that NY warm water fly fishing. Start with tying some fluffy looking crayfish patterns in olive, rust and black. #10<#6. Bead eyes, hook up ( Clouser style). I'll post some of my other favorite patterns.
Bluegill,
The jig head style is designed by rpdog. He makes awesome ice and open water jigs. The hook style is just me not being able to leave well enough alone.
Nor vise......I've had a couple opportunities to use a nor vise. It's certainly well made and in the good old USA. Maybe even over engineered. Norm makes it look easy for sure. I thought about buying one and chose the Dyna King Ultimate Indexer instead. Price was near the same. Around $600. Although you can drop another $300-$500 on accessories for the nor vise very easily.
What I liked:
Very smooth operating
Held hooks very well
Super fast production capabilities (if you're in to that)
Compact
Nice array of accessories.
Impressive fit and finish.
What I didn't like:
Seemed that getting the hook on a true center axis was tricky. It required a poor hook position in the jaws. That is, the hook was held way up the bend making it awkward to work around the tail of the fly.
Not handy for small flies
Cannot tilt head up
Near impossible to use without the auto bobbin setup
Requires many different accessories for different styles of tying adding significantly to the investment
The Dyna King required I addition. A set of fine jaws for tiny stuff. I tie pretty slowly by production standards. Not more than a dozen of any one fly at a time. Speed is not particularly important to me. I'm in no hurry at the bench. All I can say is the Dyna King is a joy to have on the bench. It just feels and looks right. I use the rotary function all the time. If only to look at all sides of a fly while tying. I can turn the jaws straight up in the air to get a #22 in the fine jaws just behind the hook point leaving me all the room I can get to tie. It adjusts very easily to get any hook on a true center axis for rotary tying. There's even an attachment to align the hook, although I haven't needed it.
The only alterations I've made were to polish the jaw barrels. They felt a little sticky to me. Having worked as a gunsmith, it felt like a factory trigger. Now it feels custom. I also inlaid several heavy magnets to my vise board to hold the vise in place. I wasn't used to tying on a platform vise. Lastly, the brass thumb screw that fixes the vise shaft to the pedestal base just didn't seem to hold the vise in place well enough. I tend to exert some force when tying bigger flies. So I drilled an indent into the shaft and dropped a detent ball into the seat for the thumb screw. Works like a charm.
The alterations are 99% my own fussy nature, 1% necessity.
No fly tier needs to spend that kind of cash on a vise. But then, need has little to do with it.
Rg
