I make this post every two years or so, hoping some not-so-braindead
fly tying
materials wholesaler will (finally) recongnize a good idea, package it
up
and sell it, so we all can use it.

The closed-cell dryfly foam they (everybody) sell in fly shops is
lousy. Stinks, in fact.
It's too dense and heavy to work well for its intended purpose. You
might think
your closed-cell Chernoble Hoppers are great, but that's only because
you don't know
any better. Make those same hoppers out of ultra-ligth weight foam and
you'll see what I'm
talking about. You'll never want to use anything else.

It is entirely possible to buy ultra-lightweight closed-cell foam, and
yet nobody does it.
The most amazing part of this story is that I figured this all out in
1991 or so,
when I was investigating materials for boat seat covers.

Foam is sold to big distributors by the bun, where a bun is like a cord
of wood:
a 4' x 4' x 8' block of foam, shipped over from Taiwan, usually. That's
a lot of foam.
Buns are characterized by 3 main attributes: the resin type it's made
from, the color
and the bun weight.

The foam they sell in fly tying stores (Evazote, etc) all has a
relatively high bun
weight. High bun weight foam is the most expensive. Salesmen make a
bigger markup
on high bun weight foam, so they hoodwink dim-witted fly tying
materials packagers
into buying it.....instead of the stuff they should be buying.

Low buw weight foam is amazing. It is absolutely impossible to sink.
You cannot get it at retail anywhere. You don't have to buy a whole
bun, but you
do have to talk to a wholesaler and buy about $500 worth of it to get
it all.
If Rainey or Dan Bailey or somebody finally got smart (fat chance), and
sold the right stuff,
you could make grasshoppers and adult stoneflies and bass bugs and
beatles
that cannot be drowned. You could make grasshoppers that serve as
fish-catching
strike indicators (bobbers) for lead-wrapped WoollyBuggers.

I do it all the time. But I'm only a year or two away from running out
of
the samples I got from a wholesaler 15 years ago, and I don't want to
have to buy a half
bun of foam just to make good grasshoppers again. I'd really like it if
the wholesalers
finally got smart. Is it to much to ask? (distributors finally get a
clue?).