Hareline Chernobyl Round End Body Cutter

What it is

The Hareline Chernobyl Round End Body Cutter is a tool for punching out foam fly bodies in a repeatable shape. It’s built with double-edge steel blades set into a hardwood frame, and you use it against the included cutting pad. The edge is sharp and the ends it cuts come out rounded, so every body matches the next.

What to tie with it

Use it to cut foam bodies for terrestrials, especially Chernobyl Ant and beetle-style profiles, when you want clean lines and matching proportions. Lay your foam on the pad, press the cutter through, and you’ve got a consistent body blank ready to tie in and stack or sandwich for thickness. It’s also handy when you’re building a pile of identical bodies for a batch of dries on standard dry-fly hooks or longer 2X and 3X styles.

Flies and the fish they're for

This cutter shows up most directly in Chernobyl Ant tying, where the rounded front and back give that familiar foam silhouette without hand-trimming each one. The Chernobyl Ant is a high-floating terrestrial dry that gets eaten by trout and panfish on rivers and lakes, and it’s also a common summer searching pattern for opportunistic fish in pocket water and along banks. The same body style carries over to Chubby Chernobyl-style terrestrial dries, which are commonly fished for trout as a buoyant attractor that can cover a lot of insect shapes.

How it compares

Compared to cutting bodies by hand, the cutter is quicker and the shapes come out more uniform instead of varying from fly to fly. If you’re tying multiples, it removes a lot of the slow trimming and re-checking for symmetry.