Float making raw materials

[Phil Arnott]

If you have a good old fashion model shop locally you will find lots of useful materials for float making. I now visit one at Monk Bar, York having lost the ones in Hull and Selby. They stock excellent paints, brass wire, and balsa dowel which I was told was mostly sold to anglers for float making.

As others have mentioned kebab skewers are good for float stems also bamboo chop sticks. I've obtained crow quills from game keepers and I was given a supply of peacock quills by a lady in my village who kept peacocks but I also found some in a tackle shop and paid £5 for 70 one foot lengths. I've also picked up various bird quills at times when in the country or on the beach. I have a collection of old bottle corks.

It's worth asking in well established tackle shops as they often have float making bits tucked away that been in stock for ages and forgotten about. I bought a load of cork bodies at one time, the peacock quill mentioned above and also bought a shop out of the stainless steel eyes shown below. The ones on the left are for sliding floats. You can make float eyes from fine brass or copper wire but they tend to be soft.

[Phil Arnott]

One of the hardest things when making your own floats is getting the hole for the tip section central and true,

Hi Nobby - If you have a pillar drill or a mate with one, you can make a drill jig out of a suitable block of hard material.
You just drill through the block with drill of the same dia. as the float stem then open up part of the hole with a drill of the same dia. as the body.
I have a block of aluminium drilled out for various diameters of stem and bodies.

[Banksy]

Plastic imitation corks are increasingly used for stopping wine bottles.
Are these of any use for making float bodies?
Will they turn and sand to shape?

[Peter Wilde]

On eyes for the bottom of the float stem: I often use very thin single-stranded electrical wire (the kind called "bell wire" is OK). Use a small pair of pliers to make one full turn round a pin held in a vice, forming a small eye, with the two ends a half-inch or so long. A refinement can be to hammer these ends to make them flat and easier to whip to the float stem, but that's not essential. Of course the method of using a cut-off eyed hook shank would work too. But I like my method as it re-uses some offcuts of wire; as others have said above, there is much satisfaction in doing one's own thing with found materials!