Cutting your own sinktips

[Piker20 0]

Hopefully some of you guys make your own sinktips from fly lines to fish off the end of your spey or Shooting head lines.

Currently I make them for my 10 weight (spey) rod from DT12 lines and they are great. Simply use some shrink tube and a hair straightener to melt loops and cut them to 5ft, 10ft or 15ft lengths.

 

I am keen to make some for my 8 weight Spey. Does anyone have a formula for the weight of the line I want to be cutting based on the weight of the head I'm using? I know there are skagit formulas out there but this is more like posh poly leaders and skagit formulas are not going to be the best to use.

[whatfly 0]

Typically I just use Polyleaders because I'd rather blame Airflo if one of the loops fails (grin). There's an old discussion on the speyclave that includes the grains for Polyleaders that you might find useful: http://www.speypages.com/speyclave/showthread.php?t=25005 Found a table for the Versileaders here: http://www.riverbum.com/Rio-Spey-VersiLeaders/ You did not say what sink rate you were shooting for, but for an 8 weight, straight T11 or T14 would work as well, although you would have to use braided loops (Rio has a mono core, although I think the Airflo equivalent has a braided core).

 

For shooting heads, the old rule is upsize the line 2 times, so a 10 weight line would work fine for your 8 weight. Again, I use these infrequently enough that I just get an off the shelf Rio head, which they now size by rod size to try to take away the guess work. I did make a custom head out of Rio T11 as well for an 8 weight by starting with 30' (sold in these lengths if you cannot find someone who sells in bulk) and then cutting it down to 28', which is essentially a 10 weight head.