Primrose dun

[la_jolla1]

Attempting wings after Wingman's SBS. All comments/suggestions/ demolition and humour welcomed!

#12 hook
primrose thread
yellow synthetic thorax
mallard primaries

[shpeil]

I'm not familiar with the pattern. The breadth of the wing is a little slimmer than I would normally go for but that does look in keeping with the sparseness of this particular pattern.

Traditionally, the wing would lie lower on most wet fly patterns. That large thorax is pushing it up. Not necessarily a bad thing (depends what effect you're after) but if you were wanting the wing to be lower you could build up the head a bit first to raise the thread bed before tying in the wing (which is likely to lead to a big head) or make the thorax smaller or fold the wings around the thorax as Davie McPhail does on his You Tube videos (so the wings are sitting more on the side rather than on the top of the hook). Alternatively, you could try grabbing the wing and pushing it forward to the eye so that it creases near the tie in point and curves over a bit to lie lower.

[wingman]

Very nice lajolla1, I'm not familiar with this pattern so I can't really say how it should be tied. The fact that there's no hackle and tail is a new one on me. Your wings are not bad, they seem to have come around the shank and seem positioned more on one side of the hook rather than right on top of the shank (unless its just the angle of the pic), this could be the fact that the thorax could be a bit too bulky and is interfering with the wingslips when the pinch and loop is applied. As spheil has pointed out, the bulkiness of the thorax is pushing the wing up, but this might be the intention of the pattern so maybe it was intentional I don't know. I also think that you are tying on a longer shanked hook than what I would normally use for a standard traditional wet i.e. a kamasan B175 would give you a much better looking fly proportions wise, body to the barb, wing up to a length and a quarter of the hookshank length and depth of wing equal to half the hook gape. Also partridge 3399 wetfly hooks look a good bet, which I'm finding hard to get hold of in the UK. You might find it easier just tieing in wings on a plane hookshank, no thorax, tails, hackles etc to worry about, just until your'e happy with the result then say add a slim thorax and tie the wing to see what difference it makes, in other words don't try to tie a whole fly but just practice tying in wings, if you don't get it right undo the tie and try again, if you use mallard the fibres should stay pretty well in place even after you untie it to have another go at the pinch and loop, failed again - untie it and try it again until you get it the way you want, its just practice...keep at it.

[la_jolla1]

Thanks guys, just the help I needed! Much appreciated.

Hugh