Could be any of those James. What type of hooks do you generally buy?

On the smaller hooks you need to take some care when they are in the vise. Especially, I have found, when you are finishing off a fly by whip finishing at the eye. With the thread that far forward it can put a fair amount of pressure on the shank of the hook and may cause some weakening.

I haven't generally had that problem so I would be curious to know what type of hooks you have been using.

Jim

 

What kind of hooks are you buying?
Do you store them in a wet fly box?
Are the older hooks?


Be gentle with the vice, you can crush hooks, easily sometimes. I have broken some hooks on stillwater fish, but these were really old size 22 hooks, that might be your problem. In my opinion the old "mustad classic" is the best hook for small flies, the chemicaly sharpend tiemcos and others tend to be of such fine wire they will bend out and break. Also, these hooks are much more brittle than other, none chemicaly sharpend hooks.

my .01

 

James, when de-barbing the hook, are you using pliers or another tool to large for the hook size? placing stress on the bend of the hook when clamping down on the barb may fatigue the metal in the bend, if this is where the breakage point is. I have had hooks break before, but more than 1 in a 100 means either a defective batch, or operator error. Just a thought, since you appear to be just starting to tie size 20-24 flies, your tool you used for bigger hooks may need replacing for the little hooks.

BTW, you have my admiration for being able to tie such delicate and miniscule offerings. I feel great if I can see a size 18 well enough to tie on my tippet!

 

I agree with the others-try lightening the tension on the vise, and dropping more of the shank of the hook into the jaws of the vise (hard to do with really small hooks).

If you stress the shank by tightening the vise too much it will cause those hooks to snap regularly. I bet that is the problem here.

Unfortunately, if you are using a relatively cheap vise, it may be difficult to adjust it to the needed tension for tiny hooks. This is one case where it makes sense to buy a good vise.

 

James,

I agree with what has been said already. I'd like to add this though; I never had problems with gamakatsu hooks before except for one time during an opener where I hooked up 5 kings but landed only 1 due to broken hooks. It was the first time I ever encountered this problem. Eventually I figured it was just the batch of hooks I bought. I took mine to the store and showed them what's left of the packet and showed them the broken hooks. They replaced the packet and I disposed of the flies I tied from that batch of hooks and never had the same problem again. Might be far fetched but I went back the next day and landed all the fish I hooked except 1 that I LDR'd.

Tight lines

John

 

Are the jaws on your vise chipped?

 

Thanks for all the info! I didn't think of a lot of them, and having the responses got me thinking a lot about how I handle my hooks when tying.

Based on all the info that I got on this site and found out the following...

1) The hooks I'm breaking are teimco. They are the fine wire size 22's that I've got. The size 20 heavier gauge hooks are fine....

2) I haven't had a problem with the mustand hooks I've got (size 20 and 22)

3) I usually break the thread off against itself when tying to save some time.

4) The breaks are occuring right at the bend (i.e. where I break the thread off).

So it looks like the mustad hooks I have for whatever reason are resilient to the thread breakoff when tying, while the Tiemco are not. So it looks like behavior can be modified. I'll be tying a new batch up in the next week or so, and this time I'll trim the thread rather than breaking it off. Hopefully this will fix the issue.

 

Do not try to hide the hook point in the vise jaws while tying your flies. Because the point area of the hook is tapered you have to tighten the vise to much to tighten down to the wire size at the taper and that can weaken the hook at the bend area also sitting in the jaws, which is thicker then the tapered part of the hook.
Also the jaws of your vise may be to large to tie small flies on without the jaws clamping into the tapered area of the hook unless you are real carefull with the hook placement in the jaws. If this is the case you will either need to be real careful to only have the hook bend in just the tip of the jaws or look into some midge jaws which would give you a smaller contact point to start with, making it easier to not get any of the tapered part of the hook into the jaws of the vise.

 

Not to change the topic. But how do you tie on a size 24 hook? I'm impressed.

 

James,
I like your followup anaylsis, but don't disregard the stress possibly caused by pinching the barb. I've tied with both Mustad and Tiemco sz 18,20 and had this problem. I found that careful debarbing solved it for me. Use hemostats or pliers that are flat, not grooved. I always debarb at a 90 degree angle to the hook and am careful not to twist as I'm pinching. Best of luck!

-Marc

 

OK mr. mello.

Thanks for ruining my day. I was at RF for about 2 hours this am. I had read this thread a couple days ago and thought "weird, that's never happened to me." Well, guess what happened next. I finally hooked up and had the fish on for awhile when he suddenly spit the hook. I didn't think much of it until I checked my hook and saw that he broke my hook on the bend. It was a size 14 Tiemco 200R. I was excited because I was trying out a new pattern I had tied for the fly swap. The second cast with the fly, mr. trout saw it land and moved 10 feet to grab it. I hope for the sake of my cohorts in the swap that I didn't get a bad package of hooks. I didn't have but one of those flies with me so I couldn't try out another, but now I think I will have to check out another fly before I send in my flies for the swap. I wonder if my wife will buy into that thought process and let me go fishing this weekend......

Anyway, no more posting of rotten things happening to anyone on this site, so it won't happen to the rest of us please.


Waynebawling:

 

The second cast with the fly, mr. trout saw it land and moved 10 feet to grab it.

Waynebawling:

No I didn't...Why would I want to do something like that?... J/K
I wont be over to RF til later this winter.

Anyway, call it dumb luck but I have only broken one hook. Ever. I have bent out a couple, but I tend to lose them before I use them that much...