Day of the Zonker

I was sitting around waiting for the Bronco's to play at 2:30 pm MT and decided to do some prep work for this seasons Transformer spinners.

Here's a few pictures from this mornings industry - Hiding hooks with industry..

Setup - Skirt tool, Skirt bands, Zonker hides, #6 3x trebles, Hair cut shears

I found that a fly tying scissors just didn't cut it. Some of the Magnum strips off a old buck rabbit's neck can be mighty tough! I use the heavier shears, to get quicker cleaner cuts.

The skirt tool is a handy and inexpensive addition to any tackle junkies tool arsenal. Skirt bands have other interesting uses as well. I use them on open loop spinner baits to keep the leader from slipping up out of the loop. Even started putting them on some of the new display pegs during transport.

In this application, the tool provides a quick attachment of the zonker to the hook and avoids hundreds of wraps, half hitches and a good amount of buck hair aggravation!

Slide the bands over the needle nose, remove it and ready for action

Snip, Snip, Snip goes the scissors and pinch the 1 inch zonker into the three treble troughs

Use a twisting slide into the sleeve to get the zonker to behave. Then  'carefully' push a band  off the tube over the zonker

They bushel quick. You'll likely do some trimming above the zonker when it comes time to put them on a spinner.

Blaze Orange zonker banded treble hooks

Red ones

Crayfish 

Fluorescent Yellow

Plenty more to make

Fun, Fun, Fun

And some tri-colors

Anyways, I put a small buck tail from a batch Ben tied on the first prototypes and really liked the drag a dressed hook provided in combination with the June Bug blade. The first few were twisted on.

At first, I was going to use buck tails to dress them out, but tying them for smaller spinners was tedious and they're expensive to buy. I still use buck tail on some of larger spinners.

Tying for your own use, in small numbers, no problem. You can definitely get some awesome custom multi-color buck tails in your favorite colors if you tie your own.

Small steps and incremental cost improvements.

The prototypes turned the corner from tied bucktail to banded zonker. Because the zonker had such variety on color choices, I decided to use the slip R bend on the treble hook to enable swaps on the colors and hook replacement as needed. You can also substitute single hooks for trebles, add weedless hooks or barbless, depending on regulations on your favorite waters.

Here's a few pictures of the Transformers as being sold around the country today.

Here's a link to the Medium Spinners category web page 

FCS Medium Spinners page

and the Transformer web store detail for more pictures June Bug Transformers

The Bronco's won. Cheers and Happy New Year!