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Latest News April 2008 The old hooks section is starting to take shape For those of you who may have vintage hooks you wish to sell or trade, email me at ronn @ this website (spam prevention) or call at 503-654-0466 April 12, 2008 next WM Bartleet Tying meeting. March 2008 North West Fly Tyers Expo at Albany Oregon -
Site February 2008 Hooks a pictorial account.... the UK hooks have been added here November 2007 I sent a Hook Sample case to Bud for the Sommerset NJ fly tying show. For more pictures of the show see these links on FTF November 3 - Fly Tying Rendevouz Troutdale Oregon I tyed these Tragopan Dee's at the FTR show in Troutdale.
Here's a few shots of tyers Jackson Leong and Larry Nicholas at the FTR show.
October 2007 Let me frame some thoughts on hooks and values, vintage of course. You had hook makers like Allcock's, Bartleet (in it's different forms), Mustad and quite a few others that aren't household names that were each making tens of thousands of hooks a day, hour, etc back say a hundred years or so. A company like that could boast of making millions a year. Small numbers really once the hook making processes were mechanized. Figure that say even 80% of those were used and/or lost. 99% even. Say 10,000 hooks per company per year were squirreled away and forgotten. Use 10,000 (1% of 1,000,000) per year for just three companies times 50 years and you have 1,500,000 hooks that could be hiding in attics, garages, basements, storerooms and other dark places. Now, figure out how many hooks were produced by Ron Reinhold, Gene Sunday and a handful of other not so well known but very good hook makers during the past twenty or twenty five years. MAYBE one of them could produce 10,000 total for a year. I doubt it but, let’s just use that number anyway. You can see that even on the best day, the number of collectable hooks from commercial hook makers is potentially very high while the numbers of surviving (unused) hooks from just Ron and Gene will be VERY low even in light of how impressive Bud’s pile of hooks are to look at. My opinion for what it’s worth is that those guys did something special with hooks on a very small scale compared to the hook industry as a whole. Reinhold absolutely did something significant by actually offering almost 150 different hook shapes and sizes and doing it by building the machines needed to produce hooks from raw wire to fishable hooks and with consistency. His hooks were/are something quite special I think. In the world of collecting, the difficult part is figuring out what will be of value in the future. Well, hooks have been completely ignored since man first used crude bone or wood hooks to this day. I predict that in two to four years, hooks (significant hooks I mean) will be a major investment item for some collectors. That means that if you have some Reinhold or Sunday hooks, you might want to take special care of them. You might even want to consider buying more if you find them. Those guys are never going to make another hook so whatever survives now, is what it will be forever. I will be doing a new section on vintage hooks for my website soon. If any of you have old hooks that you know a little about what they are and would like to let others see them, let me know. We will try to give information about who and when they were made by. I don’t envision it providing values because that is all over the place now and can change overnight. Mostly, I hope to show you very interesting old hooks that you may never have the chance to see anywhere else. The more I delve into this topic, the more interesting it gets. I think many of you will find it interesting too even if you never get the bug to collect hooks. September 15 2007 East Meets West - WOW what an event! August 28 2007 Everything is back to normal on the computer front ... read my recommendation here August 2007 Trying to recover the from a hard drive failure. Getting a lot done on the hot rod. July 24ish 2007 Ouch ... computer crash! July 20 2007 Nothing much going on here. New motor mounts on the '39 and trying to make the power steering pump not flex under pressure. They sure put the pump and alternator on in a Rube Goldberg sort of way. I will probably get the gas tank back in this weekend and get it running again. Still haven't put the dropped spindles in yet so I won't put the sheet metal back on till they are in. One fender is coming right along with filling the seam. Probably will start the other this weekend. Tail lights are right after that. Summer is half over!!!!!!!!!!!! July 13 2007 And so here's the progress on the 39 hot rod The Lucas 4th - I worked kinda and Chris worked. I didn't get much accomplished other than guttering a few hooks and studying the steering and the front brackets on the '39. I had the idea that maybe a page for the '39 would be kinda cool. The progress of it. 2007 FAOL tying contest is wrapping up. June 2007 Come and gone ... I've got a new hot rod project. It's a 39 plymouth and you can see the progress here May 2007 Hook requests & orders are piling up. I'm about 4 weeks out. I'm so busy I can't even tie a fly. April 2007 Aaron Ostoj demo'd a tied in hand Butcher ... we are working on a video version for the web site. March 2007
I said that the black japan finish that has been used for centuries and the system for doing this lost “black art” that Ron Reinhold managed to develop had been and would continue to be the only way we’d do black hooks. Well, I have been wrestling with a real conundrum since then. I knew fully that the system we now use to apply colour to our hooks can also do black. In fact, we can do an exhibition finish on a hook in less time than the long and often extremely frustrating japan exhibition finish. Plus, it looks better, is as hard as japan and we don’t make rejects!
Happy Trails!
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