egreen cobra

The shiners down here are a bit sturdier,

I've used OOMOO to mold shiners in the past, I've yet to perfect it. I was doing two piece molds the main issue I was having was that the side of the bait exposed to air would flatten out and the bait would have a normal side and a flattened side. I believe that freezing the bait would help. I also think that doing a slip mold/clam mold would be the way to go. I came across a taxidermy tutorial that explained a similar way of doing it with dental alginate and then casting a positive. I've picked up some alginate and just need to find a poor shiner to sacrifice...

What do you use for regular production? Aluminum, steel?

Very Cool...

Look very nice.

I've made something more similar to the Castaic trouts, with hard floating plastic heads and soft plastic body/tails. Its pretty easy and the results aren't bad, although I made mine to model large Golden Shiners here in FL, downside is that Castaic Soft Baits has a patent on hard head/soft tailed lures so you wouldn't be able to sell it (which of course means you'd slay them on it!) I imagine it'd be fairly easy to make any combination of hard and soft parts...