Tak Shimizu makes hooks the old fashioned way

I always learn a ton at the FFF fly fishing fair each year.

This year, perhaps the most interesting person I met was Tak Shimizu, who makes hooks the old fashioned way.

Or maybe it’s that he makes old fashioned hooks a more modern way.

Anyway, Tak, from Canada uses tools from a

machinist to cut a barb in a metal rod and bend it to the appropriate shape and files to make the hook point and file down the area where the hook eye will be attached.

The hooks don’t have eyes, they ultimately have a loop of braided monofilament attached.

The hooks are beautiful and of the sort that are used to tie classic, fully dressed salmon flies that take hours to put together.

Tak explained to me that his tools don’t always work correctly and that he’d just gotten them back from a machinist before the fly fair.

And he also explained how he’d been working on getting just the right white paint to bake onto the hook for a fly he was tying called The Evening Star, which is believed to have been created by George M. Kelson.