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Crankie221

Pesky Pike Teeth Devcon Etex Or Dn

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I used to use epoxy, but only used the D2T for coating the insides of my swimbait joint, before I assembled them and coated the exterior faces with either Etex or NuLustre 55.

That was when I was building my swimbaits from wood.

Switch to PVC decking for building, and your baits will last until a big one takes it away from you. It is both hard and waterproof, so the top coat is just to protect the paint job.

When I build swimbaits for the salt, where our SoCal toothy critters roam, I use an exterior urethane over the PVC lures, and they hold up fine.

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Man, you picked a tough material to build from for sale.

When I built from wood, I used poplar and still had headaches from failed baits due to water intrusion, no matter how well I sealed the wood before painting. Jointed baits have too many places for water to get in and swell the wood, causing paint and top coat failure.

I do still have some old wooden one piece walking baits that I painted with rattle can paints, and they are still usable, so maybe yours will be okay.

Just seal the heck out of them before you paint them.

I switched to AZEK PVC decking, and then their trimboard, because I didn't want any warranty issues with the lures I sold. I stood behind the lures, but told people the paint would get scratched, hopefully by lots of big fishes teeth.

Good luck.

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I like the way you say it was only a 8lb LoL! If you anticipate catching larger pike you're going to have to consider another type of wood.

A big pike, like the muskies we have up here will crush balsa regardless of what kind of topcoat you use.

Consider this, balsa has a hardness rating of 100 lb-f vs cedar that has 900 lb-f.

s54

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If the main reason your building your bait out of balsa is for it's high degree of buoyancy you might consider trying some built out of paulownia. It's almost as buoyant as balsa, but is much tougher. Or you can do like Mark suggested and build them out of PVC trim board. I'm told the trim board has about the same buoyancy as balsa. I have just started using the PVC (thanks Mark) and so far I love it. There are different types of the PVC for different applications. The trim board is the lightest and the decking is heavier. You can choose which PVC to use based on what your building your lure to do. Shallow cranks and top waters can be built out of the trim board. Deep diving cranks can be built out of the heavier decking. One thing I learned real quick when starting out building baits is that you can run out of room to put everything (hook hangers, line tie, ballast, rattle's) real quick. Using a heavier product to build the body means you don't have to add as much ballast which saves room.

Ben

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Thanks for the info on the musky s54 I guess the only reason i said it was only 8 lb is that i have had days when my son and i have caught upto

30 pike in a day on a brown trout 70ml countdown upto 18lb on this tiny lure made of balsa and at the end of the day it had a quite a few teeth marks / scuffs but these lures are not covered in a large amount of epoxy which i had hoped would hold up better Aestheticcaly. As for the balsa i do intend on making a mould of my carved lures and using a more suitable material as a base but at the moment i have no idea what

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I don't think that would be possible Crankie. I'm no chemist so I can't be 100% positive, but I think that by the time you got PVC hot enough to turn it into a pourable liquid it would probably catch fire. And you definitely wouldn't want to be breathing the fumes from melted PVC anyway. There are some really nasty chemicals in it.

There are resins and foams that are specifically designed for making molded lures. Alumilite is one that comes to mind and it seems to be fairly popular among lure builders. Check out the Larry Dahlberg videos on YouTube. He's affiliated with Alumilite now and has several videos showing how to use their products to make molded lures.

Ben

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