I’ve made a bunch of wooden hair stackers over the years – too many to remember – all on the lathe. They work, but are a pain to get right, especially the bottom of the lower piece, which needs to be smooth. Requires a very special drill. Or the use of epoxy to fill the bottom… And even then, round stackers – not just the ones you make at home, but also commercially produced ones – have a tendency to mess up the stacked hair when removing the bottom end from the top barrel to grab the hairs – for any number of reasons. So when I saw John Nicosia’s ‘Swinger’ stacker, I wanted to try and make one for myself. That was a fair few years back. About a year ago I finally bit the bullet and actually set about crafting a few, but the finished stackers wouldn’t co-operate, so I ditched the project. But recently I decided to try once more, with better, denser woods, that result in smoother internals after drilling and routing, and wooden hinge pins instead of brass rod (which is always too thin f...
There were some rule changes for our local trout stream put on the book for this year - one of which is that it is now imperative to carry a landing net at all times, and it should be long enough to be able to net fish from high banks - mind you, the rule doesn’t specify having to actually use it: you can still unhook a fish in the water with a suitable release tool without actually ever touching the fish, which in my opinion is a much, much better way of releasing fish than using a net. However, in order to comply with the rule, I decided to make a long-handled net out of bent wood strips, like the previous ones I showed here. The net hoop is 3 strips of ash, soaked and bent, glued to a yellow poplar handle.