While I really like to use tungsten on nymphs to get the flies down quickly, I’m less concerned about that on streamers where I am using cones 1 so I generally go with brass for this application.
| Cones are generally, and this is so confusing, sold as small | medium | large instead of dimensional measurement. Get Googly and find a cone size to hook size chart, but you can also just eyeball them. |
Instead of buying these by weight, I’m really looking for something that looks proportionally correct for what I’m tying. This is because I can hide wraps of weight behind the cone and under bulkier body materials in the form of non lead wire.
Cones come in a myriad of colors, like beads I just buy something light and shiny and something dark (and less shiny, dare I say * tactical *). Non lead wire comes only in lead color and gets hidden anyway. No meaningful choice there yet. I’m sure tying material companies are working on it.
-
Also, at the time of this footnote tungsten is expensive and on the verge of becoming insanely expensive. There’s so many ways of weighting a streamer (including the line you use) you should be able to engineer your way out of this. ↩