The version 2.0
The version 1.0
Year 2012, we had a International Fly Fishing Festival in Malaysia… one of the fly tier from Japan, Yusaku Tsutsui from Osaka amazed everyone with his foam popper and crease pattern.
The original pattern by Yusaku
From Yusaku’s idea.. I did some modification, replaced the hackle tail with fibers and bigger boddy for better flotation..I tie it bigger to suit our local water and to hunt for GTs… tested the version 1.0 pattern in Seychelles and it was load and attract many fishes but the hook up rate was not very good.
I decided to look into an articulate version, with a hook extended out from the body. the version 2.0
In this tutorial.. it was tie with 4/0 hook… you can actually enlarge or shrink it to meet your requirement..
The template of the foam with dimension
Material list:
2-3mm close cell foam ( depend on your hook size )
220 lbs hard wire
Gamakatsu SL12S or any heavy and strong wide gap hook
Epoxy eye
epoxy and markers
red fine dubbing
flashabour, natural or synthetic fibers and UV flash
Picture step by step tying instructions :
Prepare the foam sheet
Use the lighter, fused the foam
Prepare the hardwire spine, with the hook as your desired
Tie in a mono loop, and some red dubbing
Prepare the tail… tie to a mono line
Bring the tail mono line thru the body, secure the tail with a small drop of epoxy
Tie the body to the spine and tie the tail’s mono to the spine too
Now fused the head portion
Tie down the head near the eye of the hardwire spine
Fixed the head portion with epoxy, glue the foam to the spine, make sure to cover the whole spine
Colour the foam and stick the epoxy eye
Floatation test on the 6/0 and 4/0
***
a tips to adjust the weight and floatation… you can have bead insert in the tail mono before tie down. the amount of bead act as a counter weight for the floatation and also create some rattling sound when popping…
or you can also wind some lead wire to your hook shank
Cheers… Happy tying..!!!
Catch some fish ..!!!