Elf

The only soft plastic molds I'm seeing are Do-It Molds, am I missing something?

Maybe Baitjunkys can design and make a mold similar to these.

This is the only way I make tube baits. It's to bad these molds are no longer available because they shoot great and there is no cutting of the tails. I asked the manufacturer about a 6" or maybe a 7" tube mold but he wasn't very enthusiastic about it. I did manage to get my hands on 3 2" molds and a pair of 3.5" molds from the last runs he did.

Kosher salt just means it's ok for preparation of Jewish foods, it's also a large flake salt that makes it easy to pick up with your fingers to spread over your food. You want a fine flake salt, the brand doesn't matter as long as it's fine flake. Grinding salt in a coffee grinder makes the salt so fine it tends wash out the colors if you use much more than a tablespoon per cup of plastisol. Fine flake salt suspends better and doesn't wash out the colors like a fine granular salt will. (I know this from personal experience.) Baitjunkys suggestion to use a better quality plasitsol is wise also.

I'm not seeing a whole lot of benefit to joining them. What am I missing?

Batijunky's Stick 'em molds. There are no better stick bait molds. I'll make it easy to find them. https://www.baitjunkys.com/Stickem-Stick-Baits_c_172.html

I would highly recommend people skip Do-It's Senko molds entirely after my experiences with them and I don't have to be asked in order to recommend Baitjunkys.com for stick molds.

Temp probe. Laser is nice but you're going to want a probe for laminates, so get it instead of the laser. Like Frank said, you need to know what your temps are. How long do you keep heating it if you don't know how hot it is? How do you shoot good looking laminates if you don't have the temps close to each other? You don't. You will overheat and scorch your plastic w/o one.

What paints are you using? Guys that airbrush their baits don't generally talk about the paints bleeding into dipping plastic so maybe a different choice in paints could solve the bleed issue?

This. Exactly. I'm not sure exactly what would happen if you poured hot plastisol back into the bottle/jug/bucket...can't be good though....lol

Open them on each cavity, very carefully, and only take a bit of material before testing.

Do-It. They have some really nice designs but their molds have consistency issues. Couple of examples, their Senko molds, it's hit or miss on whether or not you'll have denting issues. Some folks say they never see dents (I don't believe them) and others have all sorts of issues with it. I had all 3 sizes and while the 4" shot the best, the 6" was terrible. One night I only got 4/12 good baits in 3 shots and I was doing the shots according to how a Do-It rep said to do them. I traded away my Do-It Senko molds and the guy that got them opened up the gates with a file and now they shoot fine. Their Ned rig bait, one guy said he had 8 of those molds and while 7 of them shot perfectly every single time the 8th was junk and couldn't get good baits out of it. I had one just like that.

I work in a garage in Denver and it can get pretty cold during the winter. I use a 80,000 BTU torpedo heater to heat the garage and I place molds/injectors on old paint cans in front of it to warm them up. A couple of my molds will likely benefit from preheating all year round so I'm going to keep a small supply of diesel on hand for the heater.

Here's an Enforcer Frog. I made these for website pics and forgot to snip the gates before dipping. I remembered right after I dipped the third one so I just kept going with the mistake.

Open the gates a bit, or have someone do it for you. The only other option is to sell/trade them and buy quality molds from some place like Baitjunkys. That was the option I took.