Fly-tying Knowhow: Hackle Grading

Most tyers building a hackle bench do the same thing: buy one cape or saddle in one color, run out of the colors they use most, then go back and buy another cape…

By the J. Stockard Team

You’ve heard the conversations in fly shops and online forums: a fly tyer holds up a Platinum cape, notes the price and concludes that the flies tied from it will be better than flies tied from, say, a Bronze. Which is obviously a pretty reasonable assumption. It’s also completely wrong. Well, sort of. It’s more of a misunderstanding that costs tyers money in a way that’s easy to fix once the hackle grading system is actually explained.

Whiting Farms grades hackle by quantity, not quality. Every dry fly feather on every Whiting pelt–Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum–meets the same baseline standard: supple quill, void of twist, dense barbing and greater than 85% web-free. The feather quality is identical across grades. What differs is how many flies each pelt will produce. Platinum doesn’t mean better hackle. It means more of it.

That’s the thing worth understanding before the next hackle purchase.