Leaderboard

Understood. I always make that same disclaimer as well. But at my learning stage with doing foils, it's still helpful to hear other methods - whether they are the "best" or not. As far as I'm concerned, "best" is subjective anyway. Depends on what your goals are. Some guys put quality first, some put speed first, others put cost effectiveness first. Judging my your process and your results, you are putting quality first - which is exactly what I'm doing, so I think I'm going to try that route. Thank you much for your insights, and I'll be sure to come back and let you know how it turns out!!

Yea, it is a pretty cool way to foil a lure. I got the idea from engineered angler on youtube. The head transition was very tricky. Again, I've only done this a few times, so there might be better ways to do it. Basically I foiled the scale pattern right up past the area where the gill plate would be. Then I made a quick stencil for the shape of the gill that I wanted. I carefully traced it onto the foil scales, then using a very sharp knife, i cut out that shape, and peeled the cut offs of the foil scales. . Then I cut a flat piece of foil to fit in that spot using the stencil and carefully fit it into the cutout spot on the lure. It is a pain, but can look super cool! Here is another one that worked out good too. I ended up using two separate pieces for the gill, then the head. You can kind of see the overlap, most of which i was able to hide with that black paint to accent the gill. You can see better on this one too, how I highlighted the scales with black paint, then wiped the foil scales down, leaving just the edges black. Then I epoxied over the whole bait, before adding any more paint. Looking back at it in hindsight, I really left the head/eye area blank. lol. Should have added more detail. There is still time to I guess. haha This is my version of a Manitoba "greenback" walleye.

I've been really happy with medium from baitplastics.com.

Just put a square driver bit through the base of my right index fingernail while rebuilding a swinging bench frame... might slow me down a bit. I have 3 different lipless cranks almost ready for paint though, and i'm excited to get them in the water! They are all under 3" and cut from basswood scraps from a CO2 race-car project kids are working on at school. @exx1976, I've heard house hunting can be a bear...good luck!