Thread: size 10 jig hooks

Originally Posted by 8fishermen

ordered the Jacobs and several makes and mods of hooks to play around with. We will see. I will try to post up some pics for reference once we play around with them a little.

great cant wait to see the results

Got the mold and the hooks in. Mold is of excellent quality and craftsmanship! I poured up 600 jigs in a couple of hours. I am not a commercial producer but just a hobbyist so I am not as fast as other may be. For me however, this seems like very good production. I will be pouring these for myself and others in our fly club. I liked the mold so much I ordered another one in the 1/32 oz yesterday. Can't wait to get it in. Something else I noticed was that the Jacobs mold is much easier to load the hooks into than any other mold I have. I am not saying the Do-its or the other molds I own are bad, but I will be ordering Jacobs from now own if they offer the style and size I am looking for. To me they are worth the extra dollars.

I ordered the hooks from chuckanddeb.com. They were very fast in shipping, the order was correct, and the price is as good as I have seen.

Now for the pours... I ran the mold cold without any problems. It never heated enough to where it was hot to the touch. Just nice and warm. There was a little flashing around the hook shank and the stem leading to the eye. This was more noticeable with the smaller hooks as the wire is smaller in diameter. I would think this would probably be reduced or eliminated if the mold was allowed to heat up and expand. It was not enough flashing to bother me at all. The most important part to me was there was none that made its way into the hook eye. The effect of this was reduced as the hook size increased all but disappearing as I poured the size 6 hooks. I poured size 12 EC 575 up to size 6 Matzou. I did not pour any but a size 4 Matzou fits snugly into the mold so the versatility of this mold is excellent.

Now for the hooks themselves. The EC lil nasty sickle hooks are as promised. The quality control is probably a little better than the Matzuo. The sharpness was about the same. The one thing I noticed was that where the shank transitions into the bend is more of a radius and less angular. You can see this in the bottom two jigs. The Matzuo's can be a little difficult to reshape if they are bent or straightened by a snag or fish. I would think the EC would be better at reshaping due to the smoother radios. Possibly someone with experience with both could chime in on this. I really like the size 12 EC 575. They have a long point and the barb can be crushed. This would make it similar to the comp hooks I like so much. Here is a pic of some of the pours. The heads are a little mangled where Number One Son cut the sprue from the jig. He used a pair of sprue cutters I had laying there. I did not know he was cutting them till it was too late. Hard to fuss too much as he was showing initiative. LOL



Left side is the EC 500G Lil Nasty Sickle in size 10, 8, and 6.
Right side is from the top, EC 575 size 12, VMC 9147 size 10, and the bottom one is a Size 6 Matzou Sickle.

A random sample of 10 size 6 EC weighed 40.5 grains. There are 437.5 grains in an ounce so 4 grains per jig is pretty close to 1/100 of an ounce!

Over all I am very pleased with the results so far.