I recently bought some of Ufudu’s dumbbells and decided to get good variety with and without the lifelike eyes welded onto the sides. I obviously started tying flies with the ‘pretty’ ones first and soon ran out of the dumbbells with welded eyes. Just as well as I recently also received some Solarez UV resin from Flyzinc to play with and decided to try create my own lifelike eyes.

It turned out to be surprisingly easy and I could also ‘create’ dumbbells with any colour holographic or lifelike eye I wanted to use. It may be a bit of a mission to make up hundreds of dumbbells like this, but it’s a great backup and alternative for when you suddenly want to tie in dumbbells with red, gold, or orange life-like eyes (and not the standard silver eyes). The Solarez product is also very effective, sets quickly under UV light and leaves minimal stickiness behind and to be honest I believe that my Solarez lifelike eyes looked slightly better than the commercial ‘welded’ eyes. Here is how I went about it: