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INDUSTRIAL-STRENGTH Fly T Fly Tyingying

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• FLY TYER 50 INDUSTRIAL- INDUSTRIAL- INDUSTRIAL- INDUSTRIAL- Fly Fly
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Page 1: INDUSTRIAL-STRENGTH Fly T Fly Tyingying

• F L Y T Y E R5 0

INDUSTRIAL-STRENGTHINDUSTRIAL-STRENGTHINDUSTRIAL-STRENGTHINDUSTRIAL-STRENGTHF l y Ty i n gF l y Ty i n g

Page 2: INDUSTRIAL-STRENGTH Fly T Fly Tyingying

S P R I N G 2 0 0 5 • 5 1DAVID KLAUSMEYER

AL-STRENGTHAL-STRENGTHAL-STRENGTHAL-STRENGTHy Ty i n gy Ty i n g

Enter the world of Wapsi Fly, the world’s largest fly-tying materials supplier.

B Y D A V I D K L A U S M E Y E R

Mountain Home, Arkansas lies in the heart of theOzark Mountains about three hours west of Memphis. This past summer the local airport wasn’t offering regular commercial

service. That was odd, I thought, because Mountain Home has a Walmart, a few major chain restaurants and motels, and a couple of small manufacturers.There’s a bustling downtown and a number of rather expansive neighborhoods.It seems that Mountain Home is on cusp between stillbeing a part of small-town America and spilling over intobecoming a more mid-sized city. With that will come theair service, more development, and lord knows what else.Right now, however, there’s lots of open country and it’s alovely place to visit. >>>Wapsi Fly, Inc., is the world’s largest fly-tying materials supplier. Wapsi occupies this modern 65,000-square-foot facility in Mountain Home, Arkansas. Almost all tiers have somematerials that have passed through this building. Right: Wapsi Fly is close to some of the best tailwater trout fishing in the United States. The nearby White and Norfork Rivers arelegendary for their monster-size fish.

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Anglers—fly, hardware, and bait—flock to Mountain Hometo fish the nearby White and Norfork Rivers. It’s also the homeof the annual Sow Bug Roundup and conclave of the SouthernCouncil of the Federation of Fly Fishers, two of the country’sbest fly-fishing shows. You might say that Mountain Home hasbecome the base for southern trout fishing—Ozarks style.

Mountain Home has one other fly-fishing distinction: it isthe residence of Wapsi Fly, Inc., the largest fly-tying materialswholesale supplier in the world. We’ve all seen the Wapsi logoon products in the fly-tying materials department of our local flyshops. Most of us use at least a few ingredientsbaring the Wapsi brand. If you don’t have anything that says “Wapsi Fly,” you can bet your last fish hook that you probably do have at least a few items that have passed throughtheir warehouse.

Wapsi has rarely gone in for the glitz; theirspecialty has always been the staples—fur, feath-

ers, hooks, chenille, dubbing, and thread. Wapsi carriesa few of the more popular synthetic materials and a vari-ety of tying tools and accessories, but these make up onlya small part of the business. This meat-and-potatoes com-pany is a powerhouse in the fly-tying industry; in fact,Wapsi supplies the materials sold by several of the otherbig-name companies. (I had to take a vow of secrecyabout the identity of these brands.) Several companiesalso send their raw products to Wapsi for dyeing. (Again,mums the word.) Many of these products are fly-tyingstaples; you’ll find them sprinkled throughout every issueof this magazine. But, when you remove these materialsfrom the pegboard at the fly shop, you won’t find any mention of Wapsion the packaging.

First Impressions Are DeceivingI met Tom Schmuecker, the owner of Wapsi, on several occasions, andI always thought of him as being in the fly-tying business. After spendingtwo days at Wapsi, I realized that Tom is actually a natural tinkerer wholoves to solve mechanical problems; it’s just our good fortune that heapplied his technical abilities to the fly-tying industry. Tom spends muchof the day in a small, neat workshop in the Wapsi factory. This work-shop contains a lathe, drill press, milling machine, and a wide assort-ment of hand and electrical tools. This is the Wapsi skunk works; it’swhere Tom devises new and ingenious ways to process fly-tying materials.

Tom Schmuecker runs Wapsi Fly with the aid of his sons Karl, Joe, and Eric. And I can’t overlook the obvious help of sales managerT.L. Lauerman, an old pal of minefrom the days when we both livedin Knoxville, Tennessee. Today,Tom has a payroll of more than 40regular employees and 20 home-

5 2 • F L Y T Y E R

This is a Schmuecker-size bag of dubbing. TomSchmuecker is holding abag that contains enoughmaterial to tie more thanone and a quarter millionsize 14 Hendricksons.

Wapsi uses several largeindustrial spinning machinesto speed the drying processof materials. This machinespun most of the waterout of these dyed buck-tails.

In addition to dying theirown line of products,Wapsi processes and pack-ages materials sold byother companies. Herethe guys are dyeing a pop-ular variety of flash mate-rial. Dyeing tying materialsis a messy business, andWapsi maintains a casualdress code.

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based workers who spool wire,card chenille, and do a widevariety of other piecework.

The second impression Icame away with is the incredi-ble amount of hand labor thatis required to clean, measure,cut, slice, dye, and package Wapsi’s line of fly-tying materials. Almostevery material in the 65,000-square-foot Wapsi factory requires someamount of hand labor. And once all of the materials are processed and packaged, they have to be stocked in the Wapsi warehouse whereemployees pushing shopping carts fill orders for retail fly shops and catalogs. It reminds me of the old saying about cutting firewood: it makesyou warm twice—the first time when you chop it, and then again whenyou burn it. Wapsi cuts and stacks our wood; we get to have the fun of tying the flies.

Manual LaborProcessing squirrel skins is just one example of the hand labor requiredin processing a simple fly-tying material. Every year, Wapsi sells about70 pounds of squirrel dubbing, and thousands of complete squirrel skinsand tails. Each squirrel contains about one and a half grams of fur. (Onceupon a time, Joe Schmuecker actually weighed how much fur is obtainedfrom an average squirrel.) The skins are cleaned in large industrial washing machines. Those that will be dyed are then transferred to largedye vats. After the skins are dyed the appropriate colors (Wapsi carriessquirrel skins in 10 dyed colors, as well as natural gray and fox squirrel),they are stretched and tacked to sheets of plywood. (The natural-coloredskins forego the dyeing process and go straight to the stretching boards.)These boards are placed on large racks, and the racks are rolled into a heated drying room.

The drying room is like a mild sauna and speeds up the drying process.By the next morning, the squirrel skins are dry andready for more hand processing. The first step is to pullall the nails and remove the skins from the plywood.Skins that will be sold whole are ready for tanning andpackaging—again, another hand operation—but skinsused for dubbing must be shaved, and the dubbingmust be measured and packaged. Wapsi processes morethan 23,000 squirrel skins per year, and let’s be honest:squirrel dubbing and skins aren’t fly-tying best sellers.

Wapsi offers more than 20 different varieties of dubbing: Super Fine (one of the most popular dry-flydubbings on the market), Sow-Scud, Life Cycle, Beaver,Kaufmann Blends, Rabbit, Antron, Antron Bright,Crawdub, Angora Goat, Super Bright, and Awesome‘Possum, plus the SLF line of dubbing and other dubbings Wapsi “private labels” with the brands of other fly-tying materials suppliers.Many of these dubbings are all-natural materials, some are a combina-tion of natural and synthetic ingredients, and a couple are pure plastic.Altogether, Wapsi sells more than 500 different varieties and colors of

Wapsi dyes various furs ina wide variety of colors.After the skins are washedand dyed, they are hung to dry. These arctic foxskins are almost ready forpackaging.

Olive Woolly Buggers,anyone? Wapsi dies 15pounds of marabou of onecolor at a time.

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dubbing, and all require hand processing—dyeing, blending, and packaging. (Don’t blame Wapsi if you can’t find the right texture and color of dubbing.)

Wapsi’s Super Fine dubbing is a fascinating product, yet it seems so simple on the pegboard at the local fly shop: little packages ofthin synthetic hair, all arranged by color. Super Fine dubbing starts

as a 700-pound bale of material purchased from atextile mill. The material is actually designed forstuffing pillows, sewing clothing, or some otherpurpose; Wapsi just adapted the ingredient to flytying. According to Joe Schmuecker, Wapsi haspurchased only about 10 of these bales in the his-tory of company. (You’ll learn why they’ve neededso few bales in a moment.)

“That’s one of the problems,” Joe said when hepointed to a neatly packaged bale that was aboutthree feet high, four feet wide, and eight feet long.“We think that’s a lot of dubbing, but that’s reallynothing for the manufacturer. They don’t want to sell only one bale. But we poke around and tryto find people in the companies we deal with whoare interested in fishing, and that makes gettingsome of these things a little easier.”

Lying in a warehouse at the back of Wapsi, thatbale of future dubbing looked pretty tame. “Rightnow it’s compressed in the packaging and rope,”Joe said, “but you should see it when we cut into it. The

thing will just keep expanding and growing!”Inside the main factory building, Joe showed me large plastic bags

full of dyed Super Fine dubbing ready for final packaging: pale yellow,blue dun, mahogany brown, cinnamon caddis, Sulphur orange, Adamsgray, and more than two dozen other colors. I poked at a big bag of Hendrickson pink. “I wonder how many flies this will tie,” I mused.

“Let’s find out,” said Joe.Joe carried the bag to a scale; it weighed 14 1⁄2 pounds. He then opened

the bag and pinched out enough dubbing to tie a size 14 Hendrickson.“We have a scale that can weigh this small of an amount,” he said. Joeweighed the dab of dubbing, and did some quick math. “That bag hasenough dubbing to tie 1,392,000 flies—give or take a couple of gross.”

If a 14 1⁄2-pound bag of dubbing will tie more than one and a quartermillion dry flies, then a 700-pound bale of dubbing will make—a mind-numbing number of flies. Now you see why Wapsi has purchased onlya few of those big bales of raw material. And remember: we’re talkingonly about Super Fine dubbing. Toss in the other lines of dubbing, andyou’ll see that Wapsi Fly is processing dubbing on an astronomical scale.

“Big” Doesn’t Begin to Describe ItWhat do I mean when I say that Wapsi is the largest fly-tying materialscompany in the world? Here are a few more examples that help provemy point.

Wapsi imports products from more than 20 countries, and has cus-

After washing and drying,many skins are stretchedand flattened on boardsand placed in the dryingroom. Each skin must be tacked to a sheet of plywood.

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