Sealing Wooden Beads

[Big Epp]

Good morning all!

I'm working on a wooden topwater lure using beads.  I'm making the beads out or wood.  Any ideas on how to seal them without clogging the hole?  I suppose if I used a different material (PVC?) it wouldn't be as important.  But, the question stands: how would you seal a wooden bead without clogging the hole for the line/wire to run through?

[Travis]

Just seal the entire bead as you need to seal the interior of walls  of hole anyway.  Personally I would likely just chuck all the beads in a small jar of dewaxed shellac and let sit for 15 to 30 minutes then remove and let dry.   Just clean out the hole with the correct drill bit and lightly sand the bead and should be good to go.   If only a few beads likely just  saturate the line hole and bead with superglue a few times over. 

 

[DGagner]

Seal them with thin superglue. Then just before the glue dries clean the hole out with a small wire. Superglue actually permeates the wood and seals quite well from water. i.e. You can sand a superglue sealed lure and taking the surface glue off won't expose the wood.

[eastman03]

Superglue was my first thought too. Liquid superglue. 
Or you could spray polycrylic. Love that stuff now. Probably wouldn’t penetrate as well as superglue. But you could just dip it in polycrylic too. It is thin enough it would clog the hole. 

[seakarp]

I suppose you could seal it inside and out.

Then slip it on a piece of wire or plastic that you coated with a lubricant like oil ect.

[jigmeister]

You can soak wooden lure bodies overnight in a mixture of mineral spirits and Linseed oil to seal and remove them for a few days to dry out .  You can then paint with oil based paints so I don't know why it wouldn't work for wood beads . I think the mix ratio is 9 parts mineral spirits to 1 part linseed oil from what I remember .