JD_mudbug
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Posts posted by JD_mudbug
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In addition to posting in the Wire Baits Forum, it would help with a picture or link to the jigs you are talking about. They come in a wide variety of shapes. It’s tough to envision what to try without a picture of the jig.
If you are talking more of a flutter spoon, on the larger ½ oz. lures, you could use a ¾” plastic jig rattle. Brass rattles are pricey. You could make some out of spent .22 ammo for the larger lures. Glass rattles are fairly fragile and would not hold up well on a spoon.
https://www.lurepartsonline.com/Jig-Skirt-Rattles
On a typical flutter spoon, you would want to put the rattle on the side that is on top when the spoon drops in the water and down the centerline to keep the flutter action. Typically, flutter spoons are tail weighted so the rattle would sit a bit towards the tail end from the midpoint. This will require hot glue and testing in clear jug of water to make sure you didn’t affect the action. Once you find the right location, you could permanently attach it with epoxy/gorilla glue, then paint the rattle and clear coat to ensure it doesn’t fall off.
On the smaller 1” lures, you may have to make your own rattles. The initial cost would be more than a couple of lures but you could make hundreds of rattles in any length you want. Find some small plastic tube, small coffee stirring straws, water balloon filling straws from the bunch packs that attach to a garden hose, check craft and party stores or Amazon for those. You can also make rattles out of small brass tubing but that adds cost. There are all sorts of ball bearings on Amazon including tiny ones (3/64”, chrome steel are $10 for 2,000) . Skip to 6:00 on the video for making the rattles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfabbOYSpxo
If you are talking more of a jighead as opposed to a spoon, you could make small rattles and tie them to the underside of the hook shank with matching colored fly thread and use clear nail polish to seal.
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I mostly make hardbaits. I started making my own in-lines over the past 5 years for pike primarily. I have only used craft store stuff for a couple of years. I am not an expert but it seems to be the same stuff. So far on the stuff I have tied they have held up well and the color has not bled out yet. I have heard the dye can bleed out but I have not seen it yet. If I were making baits for sale, I would want to use it for a longer period to be sure. For my personal use, the savings are worth using it. I would recommend going to a craft store to pick the best packs and make sure the feathers aren't mangled in the package. Some of the packages I saw in the store looked pretty crumpled and beat up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHUrrhxgEUk
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Welcome to the site.
Jann’s Netcraft and Barlows Tackle have marabou. I don’t know if they ship to Canada. Thorne Bros. also has some marabou.
https://www.thornebros.com/collections/feathers
There is some marabou on eBay and Amazon too.
Have you check craft and hobby stores? They have a variety feathers and marabou.
For large quantities on magnum hex blades, have you tried Worth Co. ? They do some custom blade finishes. You would have to call them for the copper and black nickel as those aren’t in their standard line-up for magnum hex blades.
https://lurecomponents.worthco.com/products/spinner-blades/magnum/hex
For smaller quantities on blades (and a big jump in price per blade), Leaders and Lures has some copper and black nickel hex.
http://www.leadersandlures.com/index.php?route=product/category&path=151
The musky shop doesn’t have hex copper and black nickel, but they do have some hammered #10s.
https://www.muskyshop.com/collections/blades/products/blades-monster-magnum-blades-025-10
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The Huddleston 8" Trout is a wedge tail and is very effective slow rolled. You can crawl the 8" and the 68 Special and get a seductive kick. It is not a hard thumping kick. It looks like a fish slowly cruising or one that is wounded and limping along. The weight inside each model determines the rate of fall and where it is in the water column when retrieved. They have weights from 4 oz. topwater (rate of fall 0) to 5.2 oz deep slow rollers (rate of fall 16). The 4.2 oz. rate of fall 5 is a good shallow slow roller. I have not tried the 10" as there is a big price jump between the 8" and 10" inch.
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I use everything above depending just how I feel. I cut the general angle on a table saw for repeatability. You can use a vice and hand saw too. Just use something like a piece of leather to protect the wood in the vice or make or get some vice soft jaws. I use a Dremel with the bullet, ball or drum shaped bits. Some are metal, some are stone, some are a hard rubber for attaching sand paper to. I also use carving knives and sandpaper glued or held onto dowels. Curved carving gouges will also work.
I have some concave faces I started by using the largest drill bit that fit into a drill or drill press and just using the tip of the bit followed by sanding.
If you are looking for the exact same curve time after time, I would build a jig out of wood to hold the lure at an angle and drill the cup with a drill press and a ball burr bit. I have made spitting type poppers this way which have a very similar face to those Jplug type lures. The popper body is carved and weighted differently so the the face sits upside down compared to the Jplug. The narrower curve is at the bottom and the wider curve at the top so it spits a lot of water forward.
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I don’t recall seeing pointer blanks that small. The wLure UPM 762 blank is close. 75 mm (3 inch) including the lip. The body is 67 mm (2-5/8 inch).
Janns has a 3-1/4” 78 mm pointer blank - Springer 78
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There are a lot of things in dollar, party and craft stores that can be found for cheap money. Some cheap materials are costume and party wigs, yarn, craft fur, tinsel and holiday decorations, paint brushes (fibers), feathers, braided tubing (mylar tinsel tubing, deco flex tubing), closed cell foam sheets, mop heads and cleaning mop gloves, and squishy wiggly silicone toys.
Dollar stores are great for cheap nail polish and clear top coat nail polish for coating thread.
Some free stuff:
Feathers – check around bird feeders and around the shore at bodies of water. Feathers can be found anywhere if you look for them. I have also made tail fins for large swimbait from them.
Old clothing and costumes – before someone throws out old clothing or costumes cut off any fur/hair collars and cuffs and any other material that can be used.
Nylon or plastic rope strands.
German shepherd hair- It helps to have one or a friend who does. Brushing strange dogs can be risky.
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If the bait is ready to fish, has action but tracks slightly to one side, this is when I bend the line tie. Shaving the lip could cause too much of a change to a lure that is only slightly off. Usually, only a minor adjustment is needed to the line tie. I have a crankbait tuning tool to slightly adjust the line tie. I don’t like using needle nose for this as you can’t be as precise and are more likely to crack the clear coat by applying unnecessary force.
Shaving the lip is a last resort as you can’t un-shave it. You can end up chasing adjustments to each side of the lip. If the bait is running to the right, shave a tiny amount off left side. Make sure you do this in real small amounts and check it how it’s running each time you shave it some.
https://www.tackleunderground.com/community/topic/6344-shave-a-lip/
As Travis says, if you are building lures, starting from a square or rectangular block is best to get everything marked out to eliminate issues from the start. After sealing and installing the hardware, I like to test my lures before spending time on a paint job. I seal the lip slop, but don’t install the lip. I can try different lips by using hot glue or using tape on the back of the lip. This way you can be sure you have the right size and shape of the lip for the body.
If the bait stays on its side on the retrieve, I look to see how it sits in water. If it is not straight up and down and is titled at an angle, I tape/hot glue some lead to get it to sit right and try a careful cast and retrieve. This usually means the ballast and /or hardware wasn’t centered. If the taped lead causes improvement, I will drill a 1/8” hole on the side where I had tape the lead, add lead from a 1/8” lead coil, and seal the hole. If you somehow botch this, you can always drill out the leads and fill hole with 1/8” craft dowel and superglue.
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When buying something, make sure you read the printed measurements in the product description. Don't rely on the pictures for size. The stores typically show a hand holding the product in a picture. I swear sometimes it has to be a child's hand or a small woman's hand to make the product look bigger than it is. Convert the printed metric measurements to standard if you are not familiar with metric. Compare the measurements to a ruler so you won't be surprised.
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I use 1/8" inside diameter tubing. I mostly use latex tubing as I can use it as tubing on spinner hooks and also for attaching trailer hooks to spinnerbaits and buzz baits. It is flexible enough to get over most hook eyes.
For dressings, I sometimes use a few silicone strands from old skirts. Pass the strands through the hook eye, fold down, and secure it with a small piece of shrink tubing slid on over and past the eye.
For a weedless spinner, you can also use swimbait hooks with corkscrews to rig any softplastic as a weedlees trailer. Attach the swimbait hook to the spinner with a split ring. I have used hooks like an Eagle CLaw 249W on spoons. You could try some hooks like those on spinners.
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I thought the same thing about the type of wood being a factor. I tried to make a lure out of a hickory hatchet handle and the hardener did not seem to penetrate it. I had one made from a poplar dowel. I cut the V joints after the soak in the hardener and it looked like it penetrated an 1/8 to 3/16th of an inch.
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Is that the maple you were using?
I got penetration when submerging 1-1/8" poplar dowels in the Minwax hardener. I hand carved and sanded them to a rough finish with 60 grit before dunking.
I am surprised the vacuum didn't get better results.
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I have made numerous purchases from there. I haven't had any issues. Arrival time has been anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months . I only use stores that accept paypal just in case there ever is a problem.
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In the Northeast, two types of rigs are popular. I don't see why they wouldn't work elsewhere.
One is like a pompano rig with the weight being at the end. Your main line is tied to a barrel swivel. You tie a line from the barrel swivel to a snap with a couple of dropper loops spaced apart in between the barrel swivel and the snap. On the dropper loops, you rig a hook with bright tubing, a grub, or a streamer fly. On the snap, you can use a diamond jig if you have a pier or boat you can vertical jig from. If you can’t vertically jig, you can just put on a sinker.
The other rig is a sinker slider rig. We use those instead of a Carolina rig set up. Slide main line through a sinker slider, put on a bead or a silicone skirt collar, tie on barrel swivel, from the barrel swivel tie your leader and hook/jig/fly. The bead/collar will protect your knot from the sinker slider. This set up has some advantages. You can use a braid main line and a mono or flouro leader. If your hook gets snagged, you can break it off and save the rest of the rig. The sinker slider has a clip so you can swap sinkers easily without having to tie a new rig if you need to change weights. You can pre-try some hooks so all you have to do is tie 1 knot if the line near the hook gets frayed. I usually use bait on a circle hook on this rig. I have also used some of the Gulp products and also a saltwater buck tail streamer fly. These flies have no weight and just flutter in the water.
If there is current such as incoming and outgoing tide at a river mouth, we use the flat disc river sinkers. Strong current can cause bank sinkers and egg sinkers to roll on the bottom causing snags and line twist.
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I have never done vacuum sealing so I don’t know if this will help. Like Mark, I have sealed with Minwax Wood Hardener. That stuff does penetrate deep into wood if you submerge the wood in it for a while. I used it on baits made of Western red cedar and poplar. These were 7 to 9” baits that were 2 to 3.5 oz. They would gain from anywhere from .15 to .35 of an ounce with dunks over 15 minutes. Prolonged dunks in the hardener did affect the buoyancy slightly. The baits sat a bit lower in the water than similar baits sealed with superglue. I suspect it made them dive slightly deeper. My baits were wake baits and shallow diving jointed swimbaits. It did not affect the action that I could tell, which may be in part due to the large size of the baits and type of wood. Cedar and poplar are more buoyant than maple.
Seepage was a big problem with the wood hardener on any dunk besides a brief one. The complete drying/off gassing time depended on the length of the dunk. I submerged a bait overnight once. It took 10 days before the paint stopped getting blisters. I don’t do prolonged dunks anymore because I have to let baits sit for so long just to be sure they were safe to paint. I would put a coat of Rustoleum 2x flat white paint + primer rattle can on the baits after I thought they were dry and let them sit again for 1-2 days to see if any paint blisters developed before continuing to work on them. I suspect with the penetration you will get with vacuum there could a prolonged period of seepage.
I remember some posts years ago from a striper lure maker who vacuum sealed lures. I could not find the posts. His baits were also large baits, similar to Gibbs lures. He was using 20% distilled water and 80% water based polyurethane. It did add some weight but did not seem to affect the lure’s action. I believe his baits were made from poplar dowels. He was the only person I remember trying it. In addition to worrying about a change to a wooden lure’s buoyancy and action, the question is whether it is worth the extra effort (and additional equipment if you don’t have it) over the usual sealing methods and whether it is better to just use a casting resin or PVC. If you are vacuum sealing wood to pull all the air out of wood and replacing it with a sealer you are essentially changing a fundamental characteristic of wood (the air inside it) and essentially turning it into a resin-like product. Vacuum sealing never seemed to catch on as a way to seal baits.
Maple is denser than the 2 woods I use. You would also be removing more of the air with vacuum as opposed to dunking. I think it would have some effect. I would weigh the wood before you seal and weigh it again after you have sealed to see if you gain more than 10% in weight. Maybe you could make some identical baits, vacuum seal some and seal some with superglue. After the baits are sealed and hardware is installed, you could compare how they sit in the water and their action.
There are some videos on YouTube on vacuum stabilization of wood. I don’t know if these would provide any useful information. They all seem to use an epoxy like product called Cactus Juice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWflb2KILIM&t=768s
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Same for me for the most part. But sometimes you want a small profile spinnerbait that runs deep. You can wait and let the bait sink down and reel slow to keep it down. Sometimes the small blades don’t spin well at such a slow speed. By going slow, you also cover less water. In the past, I would add weight to the hook. I have an assortment of the hidden weight spinnerbaits for that now.
You could also be on a trip where you couldn't bring all your gear and don't have access to a tackle shop. I have had to add weight to a lure in a situation where your gear is limited. It's definitely not ideal but you have to make do with what you have with you.
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One advantage to having the weight added to the hook is that it gets more weight toward the back which helps with casting distance as that weight will lead the way on the cast. It's one of the reason an egg sinker is put on the wire shaft first (at the bottom) when building a bucktail. With the spinner body and hook weight being at the end it also cuts down on center of gravity tumbling in the air problems.
On a spinnerbait or single hook spinner it can be easier to add weight to the hook. You can wrap lead wire around the hook or squeeze on a rubber core weight with the rubber remove. On spinnerbaits, bucktails or roostertail type spinners, the skirt/dressing is before the hook and hides the weight.
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You may also want to put some Flex Seal on a piece of scrap material and lay some soft plastic baits on it. I don't know if it will have a reaction with plastisol.
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The clear Flex Seal can turn opaque after repeated exposure to the elements. This doesn’t matter much when sealing a gutter on a house. On a dark lure, it can end up looking cloudy. It also won’t hold up to rocks and probably won’t do well in wood. On hot days, it becomes softer making it more subject to penetration. Once water gets in behind it, I have seen it peel off. I have seen it work well in a static situation where it just sits there like sealing around trim on a shed. I have used it to seal a crack in my OnStar antenna on my SUV and its gets worn down after a year or two and needs to be recoated.
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Welcome to the site.
I mostly use .051" stainless safety wire (also called stainless lockwire) when there is a chance at fish over 10 lbs. I use wire from Malin or Wire & Cable Specialties (WCS). It's good for wire-through baits and making twist eyes. I sometimes upsize the wire to .062" on big baits 7 inches +, and 3+ ounces. I will downsize to .040 on smaller bass lures.
I sometimes use .092" screw eyes on medium size lures 1-2 oz. When I use screw eyes, I try to get the eye of the screw countersunk into the body of the lure a bit so my epoxy will reduce the chance of the eye opening up. I don't like going with the smaller screw eyelets.
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LPO is Lure Parts Online.
Unless you need that particular weight spinner body right away, it's not really worth the effort of gluing 2 weights together. Unpainted lead bodies or finesse sinkers are fairly cheap.
https://www.lurepartsonline.com/Lead-Lure-Bodies_2?quantity=1&custcol_beads_eyes_paint_size=78
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I wonder too. I am always on the look out for trees struck by lightning. Roy Hobbs says lightning wood is the best wood to make anything out of.
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Lots of people are out there still building. I slow down my lure building around this time of year because of pre-winter tasks that have to be done and the holidays. My lure building tends to pick up after New Year’s Day. People in the northeast have to pull in their docks and swim rafts before ice- in, clean up the fallen leaves and other yard work before snow, and give their boats some maintenance and winterization before putting them away. Any day with decent weather, I try to get out fishing.
There are still posts being made but they focus on a particular aspect of a lure build like chrome finish and clear coats which apply to building a lure with any material. Other topics have been discussed thoroughly in past posts so you don’t see new posts on them. There have been lots of post on shaping and the best tools for lure building, different sealers for wood, the benefits and draw backs of various types of wood, pvc vs. wood, line thru vs. screw eyes vs. twist wire eyes, different diving lip materials, different types of lure joints, why a particular lure shape does or doesn’t work, choosing an airbrush and paints, stencils and scale netting, different finishes like glitter/foil/chrome spray/decals, mid coats and top coats, etc. I just search the old posts for the info I am looking for when I am planning a new lure build.
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I don't think the topcoat will matter as long as the wax mid coat is used. As Anglingarcher said, the key is using a wax that does not have cleaners in it.
KBS was asked about by someone in the comments. He said
" The best results are from using the floor wax but...it still becomes slightly dull. To answer your question, yes you can coat it with KBS over the floor wax."
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Wakebait action
in Hard Baits
Posted · Edited by JD_mudbug
typo
Nice paint job.
Is the joint is free moving and not binding up anywhere through the range of motion? You might need to make the slots in the rear section a bit bigger or make sure both loops coming out of the front section are at the proper location and angle to the slots.
Does the back section float up or hang down at an angle from the front section when at rest in the water? You would need to adjust ballast in one or both sections.
If you can you get the diving lip out easily, I would try different lip shapes as the bait is already painted. I like to test my baits with different lips after sealing and before painting. You can use hot glue or even tape on the back of the lip for testing if you are careful. I have a bag of assorted lips for testing. I sometimes get surprised by which diving lip works best with a given body. It greatly increases the chances of a good running bait before I put any effort into a paint job.
I have made a few baits like yours and they have similar lips to yours except they angled slightly more forward around 75-80 degrees instead of 90. Some lips are shorter but wider at the end, the lip angles out more from the sides of the bait. One of my baits didn't work well, probably due to my inconsistent carving. It did work great with a lip that had straight non-angled sides and had a round curve on the end. You could also try using a heat gun on a lip to give it a slightly forward bend so you can use the same lip slot to test different lip angles.