Pipette Hoppers and Poppers
Lab equipment flies tied using plastic pipettes.
I’m old enough to have worked in laboratories when Pasteur pipettes were made of glass with a rubber bulb on the end. You could buy them or make your own by softening a piece of glass tubing in a flame and pulling the ends apart to form a tapered section. Then you scored the thin section with a cutter, snapped it, and rounded the sharp ends in the flame. Nowadays they come blow moulded from plastic. Safer, more convenient, and a lot more useful for fly tying.
Plastic pipettes, or droppers as they are also called, come in a range of volumes with different sized stems and bulbs to allow specific volumes of liquid to be sucked up and dispensed. They are widely available online and cheap to boot, the 0.2ml ones I use cost £6.99 for a box of 120 from Amazon.
The pipette bulb measures 20mm by 8mm, not counting the rounded and tapered ends. That’s approximately a cubic centimetre of air, add the extra volume in the ends and you have over a gram of buoyancy. That’s quite a bit of floatation for a fly pattern, it isn’t going to sink in any water you cast it onto and will support a tungsten bead fly fished in a duo. A 4mm tungsten bead weighs around 0.5 grams so there’s plenty of buoyancy in reserve.
The plastic wall of the pipette bulb is thin and flexible, but the stem has thicker walls which need to be thinned down for tying onto a hook. It’s easy to do, just hold the stem close to a flame until the plastic softens and then slowly pull on the bulb. Trim the tapered section leaving enough to tie onto the hook and colour the body with permanent marker pens.
Pipette Hopper
I fish my Pipette Hoppers for carp and chub in the UK, but if you are fortunate to fish rivers in the western US that have big Salmonfly hatches I’m sure the trout would like them.
Pipette Popper
If you make a couple of modifications to the pipette bulb and put it at the front of the hook instead of the back, you have the beginnings of a popper pattern.
To form the popper body first push in the domed end of the pipette bulb with the end of a pencil to create a cavity to displace water as the fly is pulled. Then melt the stem and pinch it at the back of the bulb while the plastic is warm to make a flat section for tying in that will prevent the body from twisting on the hook. Finish off the body by colouring, sticking on eyes and giving it a coat of varnish or UV-resin to seal the eyes.
I use a jig hook for the Pipette Hopper as this allows the body to be positioned over the hook eye without interfering with tying the fly onto to the leader.
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