North Shore Tying Company: D.I.Y Rabbit Strips

Hey everyone,

Its been a little while since I have posted, I've been busy working and tying flies.

I have started tying a fly called the "Laker Leech" for a few people who fish for trophy Lake Trout and Pike on Lake Athabasca.

This fly consists mostly of rabbit fur, specifically cross cut rabbit strips. Since I am using mass amounts of rabbit, it doesn't really make sense for me to be buying twenty small packages of cross cut rabbit. So to make things more efficient and practical for me I decided to buy full died rabbit hides and cut them myself. This will be a brief tutorial on how to cut your own rabbit hides, with this method you can cut cross cut strips and zonker style strips.

You will need to purchase a couple things first:

Carpet blades

Two bolts that fit snugly in the the slot on the blade

Two nuts that screw onto the bolts (these act as spacers)

Small piece of carpet strip (two feet will do it)

This is a carpet blade, there are several types of razor blades but this style works best in my experience.

This is what the cutter looks like when it is all assembled, the blades are put on the bolt and after each blade added a 1/8 wide nut for spacing. The second bolt does not need nuts for spacing, I just inserted it for support.

Mean looking tool for sure, be very careful.

This is the carpet strip I used to hold the hide, I temporarily nailed it to my desk to make things easier.

The next step is to position the hide on the carpet strip according to what style strips you want to cut. Then start by working all the blades into the hide till you start cutting through it. It is very important that you hold the hide in the air so that when the blades cut through the hide, they don't cut the fur. If you were to cut the hide on a solid surface the blades would slice the fur. After you have started cutting the hide, just continue to work the blades through the length of the hide.