Tip & Tactics: “Hard as Nails” to open? Not any more

As fly tiers – we have all expe­ri­enced it at one time or another

[dropcap]A[/dropcap] time when you are not tying flies as often as you would like or have the oppor­tu­nity. Months go by and you have been busy with other aspects of life. Then the day comes and you have to scratch that itch. You get your mate­ri­als out and tie up a fly and your hav­ing a great time. Until you go to open your bot­tle of head cement and the remain­ing con­tents are not liq­uid any­more but are as solid as a rock. Chuck it, bot­tle no good. To bad too, because it had hardly been used.

Obvi­ously, the rea­son the head cement dried up is because the lid is not sealed up all the way, even when you screw it on as tight as you can. The prob­lem has to do with the paper gas­ket in the lid. When the lid is first screwed on the gas­ket com­presses onto the imper­fec­tions of the bot­tle and cre­ates and air-tight seal (think of can­ning jars). When you unscrew the lid for the first time it breaks this seal and it will never go back on exactly as it was before. There­fore, you have lost your air-tight seal. Lucky for us there is an easy way to rem­edy this prob­lem.

You can eas­ily regain that air-tight seal by apply­ing a small amount of petro­leum jelly (Vase­line) to the lid threads on the side of the bot­tle. Using a Q-Tip you can smear a thin layer of jelly on the out­side of the bot­tle along all of the threads that keep the lid on. Now when you reat­tach the lid the jelly will cre­ate and air-tight seal.

A word of cau­tion though – make cer­tain you do not get any petro­leum jelly around the top rim of the bot­tle. Oth­er­wise, when you place your bod­kin in the glue and rub it on the inside of the rim of the bot­tle to remove the excess you will be pick­ing up petro­leum jelly and apply­ing it to your fly. Also, take some care in plac­ing the lid back on as you can get some of the jelly from the inside of the lid onto the rim of the bot­tle if you are not careful.

All in all, this trick helps keep your head cement from dry­ing out before you can actu­ally use up the major­ity of it.

This tip was brought to you by Warm Water Chronicles […]