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crazywade

First batch of plastic lures

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Nice job Wade :)

I take it the lures are made of featherlite or another expanding foamlike plastic? I have molded rattles into 2 part molds by wiring them to the thruwire harness. I notice your hardware looks like screws. Do they mount to anything inside?

The trick is to somehow wire a rattle to the hardware so that when the mold is closed the rattle doesnt touch the mold walls. Also a ballast weight such as a splitshot or 2 are mounted to the harness.

Best daggum rattle I could find to to this is a jig rattle. They can be trimmed down if they are too wide with a pair of tin snips. Tie them to your mainframe with a piece of floral wire from walmart. Floral wire is about $1.27 a spool.

Keep'em comin bud,

Shawn

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Baits look great Wade, congrats. Curious as to whether you used the exandable foam or the featherlite. About a year or so ago I built several molds of the same bait (tadpolly, it's my favorite) and made may 20 or so molded baits of featherlite and foam. I liked how easy it was to make an exact bait time after time. I made a small jig on a piece of wood and twisted a wire harness for the baits. If you are not doing this I would suggest you do as this is one of the great advantages in my opinion of molding the baits...through wire is hard to beat for strength. I did have some problems with weighting the bait tho as the design I chose required the weight to be placed in a very thin part of the lure. In the end only about half of the baits would run which I attribute now to the difficult design I chose to mold. The expandable foam I found much more difficult to use than the featherlite.....featherlite is tough and a great product. Eventually I had some featherlite stick to my best RTV mold which destroyed it....will build another at some point.

Jed

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Hi Crazywade

A very simple and cheap way to make rattles for plastic/featherlite molded lures is to use pill capsules. The little two part capsules like you get multi-vitamins in. Use old expired capsules and empty the contents out or otherwise most health food stores sell empty capsules by the jar.

You just seperate the two halves of the capsule and put a ball bearing in one half and put the capsule back together. You can trim each half of the capsule down to a length that will fit across the body of your lure. Use a ball bearing size that has a little bit of clearance from the inside of the capsule as the plastic resin may crush the capsule slightly as it cures.

I then tape the capsule across the throughwire were you want it sitting in the body. It makes a very effective, loud rattle and best of all it's cheap. A jar of 100 of the capsules costs about US$1.50 here and if you ask around Ball Bearing suppliers they may have some old boxes of 1/4 or 3/16" steel balls that they want to get rid of. I just had a rush of blood and bought 4 boxes (1000 balls to a box) of 1/4" steel balls, which was redundant stock, for $5 a box. Don't know when I'll ever be making up 4000 rattling lures, but never mind....

Hope this helps.

Kiwi

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Thanks for the ideas guys,iv'e been doing home improvements, and have been spending most of my free time stripping kitchen cabinets, haven't got a chance to keep up with the forum. I made some rattles with some spent 357 brass, and some b-b's i put a few in the 357 and then pinch the open end shut with some pliers. kind of big for wood lures but i think i might be able to use them with the plastic/foam. Thanks again

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