Admittedly I have not posted here before despite having been a member for a longtime. I guess I would fall into the lurker category, a thief of wonderful information with nothing given back, my apologies. As a new empty nester, my new found time has enabled me to seek out things which make me happy. I have always been a very involved angler fishing for every freshwater species using all of the traditional techniques (spinning, baitcasting, centerpin, spey and single hand fly). But all of these diverse aspects were "BC" (before children) and with restricted time I focused exclusively on fishing bass tournaments until now. Another favorite hobby which has been on the backburner for too long is tackle making. Getting back into it has brought me back here amongst a few other forums (no social media).
Please excuse my babble, I felt it necessary to re-introduce myself to the group and beg for forgiveness for having not contributed in the past. To make amends, I wanted my first post to be one of offering. I do apologize if this has been already mentioned.
Today I read the exceptional thread about palmering marabou. Thank you Will Wetline, it was excellent and certainly sets a high bar for how to effectively share information. In his post he mentioned the hazard of unwanted "piercing" when tying jigs. I have a PhD in this subject through experience alone and though it only took me many thousands of jabs to my hands to find a solution I do have one to share.
Silicone Tubing! This started out as a pursuit for a heat shrink alternative to protecting the hook eye when powder painting. Having spent too much time cleaning out a completely sealed powder painted jig eye, tackle underground guided me to using heat shrink which was awesome. However because of my poor powder painting skills, it seemed that I would tear the heat shrink and clean removal was rare. I always did so when the jig was still warm, before tossing into the pail of cooling water, yet I still failed. The mention of silicone plugs and caps used in the powder painting industry, yielded items too big (ID) for my uses. A quick amazon search resulted in very inexpensive rolls of heat resistant silicone tubing with an appropriate sized inner diameter to serve me well. 1.5mm ID, 3mm ID and 5mm ID were perfect for capping the hook eyes before heating (toaster oven), painting (fluid bed) and baking. The tubing was easy to quickly remove after painting and was re-useable for the next batch. For almost buried eyes (think flat eye flipping jigs) when silicone tubing would pop off because not enough "meat" is exposed, I have successfully experimented with really thin silicone tubing which I thread into the eye. (picture below)
Side tracked from the start of this thread.... With all of this tubing laying around, and pre-cut for the next painting session, I started to slide on pieces to cover the hook points whenever I was tying skirts, feathers etc. This would be similar to the red tubing covering the hook point on Jackhammer Chatterbaits, except the silicone tubing is much more durable and for hand protection doesn't need to be as snug. Twisting the tubing during removal made the "barb" a non-factor.
Hope this helps, it isn't perfect and not always an alternative to heat shrink for powder painting. But as the title suggests, there is "No Ouch" anymore.
With appreciation,
-Paul
