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.

I cleaned my injector 3 times the other day during one session and again at the end. Looked like this all 4 times.

I've always had to clean mine also, but this is stuff that builds up at the back end of the injector tube pretty quickly. The other day there was a bunch after just 5 shots. I used to clean the injector with a bottle brush after every session, now I clean this part with a paper towel or a rag because it's just to much for the brush.

I've never said or implied that. I've done that, gently scrape the bottom of the bucket to see what's down there, and I come up empty each time with Dead On Plastix. Will it eventually? Yes of course, like Baitjunkys said, the science says it will. I don't know how long I'd have to let a bucket of this stuff sit in order to find hard pack but I haven't found it after letting the stuff sit for as long as 3 weeks between mixes. YMMV I've mixed the crap out of it with an electric drill and still get some tackiness and gummed up injector tubes. I suspect I'm not the only one to have mixed it well and still had issues. Understand I'm mixing it as long as my shoulder allows which varies slightly but is generally in the 5.5-6 minute range. If mixing requirements are longer than that I'll have to buy a different plastisol next time.

Yes but...you know that plug you always push out when you're done? It gets bigger every time. (I wonder how hard it would be to push out a plug that fills half the injector?) That said, I've done it albeit infrequently and only one refill each time. Each time I did it the plug was significantly larger than if I hadn't refilled. It probably wouldn't take to many refills to make refilling pointless. I could refill each of my 3 injectors until the plug took up to much space before setting them aside and I'd certainly be able to shoot more molds in a run that way. How many more? That's hard to say since I haven't tried. *Edit* When I did do it, I first evacuated any remaining hot plastisol back into the measuring cup and then refilled the injector.

Nice first baits! I have to say, at least your first attempt turned out the way you wanted! My first attempt was to make something smoke colored but I used to much black and ended up with grey. Lol That said, what I made on that very first attempt is catching fish and now has a name of its own so don't let your mistakes get you down. Some of my mistakes are my best work. And....Welcome to our hobby.

I have 3 total injectors, a 3 oz, and a 6 oz twin. I can shoot a Baitjunky's Ned (6 cavity), 2 Basstackle 4.5" punch craws (2 cavity each), a 4 cavity fluke, 4 cavity 7" ribbon tail, and one of my pair of single cavity frogs. I've been taking the twin apart and using them singly just because they are easier to use separated but I'm going to try leaving it together and see if I can't shoot that second frog too.

Why does that matter? Are you saying that because no one else brought it up I shouldn't have either? I've let this stuff set for weeks with no discernible hard pack on the bottom of the bucket. So while I understand that it will eventually hard pack, it simply doesn't short term and imo that's a positive for their plastisol and that positive is why I brought it up to begin with. I hope this explains my posts and makes them ok now.

It certainly doesn't happen very quickly with their stuff. Note my post above.

A bucket of the new stuff sat in my garage for almost a month before I opened it and although there was about 3 inches of separation in the top of the bucket, there was zero hard pack on the bottom. The previous bucket took several months to use up and I would go several weeks at a time w/o stirring. No hard pack. If you let it set 6 months will there be hard pack? I dunno but maybe I'll try it.

Dead-On doesn't hard pack so you don't need to worry about "stuff on the bottom of the jug".