Shaun shows me the wider section of
the large boxes where he has left enough
material to hold the brass hinge. Then he
shows me the hinge sections he is busy
making out of African blackwood. They
have a cylindrical barrel with a diameter
of 5mm and a leaf that is less than 2mm
thick. Then there is a 1.5mm hole drilled
by hand through the barrel. “I decided
to push myself a bit,” he says with a wry
smile.
Shaun started making his nets in
2015 after he saw nets being made on
YouTube. “So conventional woodwork
took a back seat,” he says. His first fly
boxes were ready for the Fly Fishing and
Fly Tying Expo in Cape Town in the win-
ter of 2016. Earlier that year Shaun came
up with his logo. He did not outsource
that task either; he designed the logo
himself, including the font. He could not
bring himself to use a commercially avail-
able font, it had to be his own creation.TCFF: What’ve been some of your
greatest challenges, the biggest
hurdles? Let’s start with the nets.
SF: I had lots of challenges, but let’s talk
glue. I started with polyurethane glue,
but the stuff just foams and makes too
much mess. I tell you, there is so much
foam that you can’t find the net! I use
PVA-type glues now. Also bending the
strips without breaking them. It depends
on how you cut them and on the grain
orientation; you have to take that into
account when you saw them.Shaun shows me his formers and
explains how he wets and heats the wood
and leaves it clamped in the former for
as long as a week. Later he glues and
reclamps the hoops. He makes them in
small batches of two to four nets at a
time. He shows me one of his first nets
that fell onto a running saw which took a
chunk out of it. He shows me the repair- a section of inserted wood that is barely
visible. It is a perfectly good net, but it is
a reject and it hangs near the wall, where
it has collected sawdust and cobwebs.
TCFF | AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2019 | 23Below: A cross-cut of one of Shaun’s
boxes: the corners are left thicker for
where more strength is needed.