Product Review: Jade River Turbo Dub Block

Not a particularly fancy review here, and no time to shoot a video demo yet either. Just a peek at a cool new fly tying tool sure to add to your list of must/like/ought/want – to have fly tying materials and supplies.

Jade River Turbo Dub Block is distributed by our friends at Hareline Dubbin. Marcos Vergara was kind enough to give me a demo and we practiced like a few fumble fingers together making up our own dubbing brushes with the Jade River Turbo Dub Block.

Stainles steel wire is the toughest, most goof proof core material, and I also practiced with copper wire in several diameters, and with thread as well. The finer core materials simply require a slightly more gentle hand, and perhaps sparser amounts of dubbing. I learned that thread-core dubbing brushes require a spring clip similar to the Marc Petijean spring clips to secure the ends of the dubbing brush, but the wire core brushes stay tame on their own.

I worked with Hareline Ice Dub and Hareline STS Trilobal Dub materials and found the Ice Dub is really-really easy to use. The STS requires a titch more finesse in the care put into spreading out dubbing prior to the spinning process. This means that the STS dubbing should be laid on a little more sparsely and evenly than the Ice Dub as the coarser STS can get clumpy if one puts thick gobs of dubbing rather than a nicely teased-out layer.

The Jade River Turbo Dub Block is wonderful for those of us who like to do production style fly tying. It is also great for achieving consistency in our flies. It is also great for making multi, colored bodies. And for those of us who appreciate the visual aspect of our materials and supplies, wow, these dubbing brushes are beautiful and durable.

My preference for working with the wire core materials is the Dr Slick Gold Barb Crusher Scissor clamp.

Final pointers on using the Jade River Turbo Dub Block . Start with a long section of wire. Being thrifty by using a too-short length of wire will complicate the process. Start with stainless wire or heavier copper similar to the Ultra Wire Brassie size. This will give you confidence and you will be able to get a feel for how tight you can twist the material before it breaks. Start with Hareline Ice Dub, as it is really easy to use. Graduate to coarser dubbing materials, and then take a shot of adding flashabou, crystal flash, pheasant tail fibers, marabou or what not, to make really eye-popping bodies.

Jay Nicholas
October 2011