[Lurehead03]

Anybody have a crawfish pattern to make a stencil out of that they might want to share I just can not seem to draw one that looks good

[blackjack]

Lurehead,
I don't really think that the pattern is as important as the colors you are going to paint the stencil on. Every manufacturer has their own craw pattern and they all work at one time or another. If you look at companies like bomber, Pradco, rapala, etc they have very detailed crawfish patterns. Hughesy does an excellent craw pattern that is similiar to the detail on the Storm wiggle wart ( pre-rapala) phantom craw(although Hughesy's is 10X better) Other companies just use black squiggley lines. I personally like the Cordell Spot craw and have used it extensively for years as my craw pattern.I have a new favorite I came up with last year called tribal craw. Bandit just uses the squiggly black or brown lines and I have caught a ton of fish on their crawfish orange belly. Get out your Bass Pro Catalogue and thumb thru and gander at all of the different patterns and come up with something that suits you and your style of painting. As for base colors dark greens shades of brown,red, orange and combinations of all of these will serve you well. Good Luck and let's see what ya come up with

[Lurehead03]

thanks for the info blackjack

[Littlebear]

Blackjack,
I was looking at your bait line.. they are very nice looking..plus you do a great job painting them..I do have a question.. on the baits that you have the line eye out on the lip.. are you casting that lip or buying it, or fabricating it.. they are well done and look cast..

I am working on some test baits that I hope to cast out of resin later on this summer..I really like the style of lip you have used on the baits I have indicated above..

thanks for any help you can give me

Littlebear

[blackjack]

LittleBear,
If you are referring to the coffin bill baits on my designs page those are repaints of Zoom Tapps I did. Those lips are punched out of .060 lexan and then the wire harness is inserted by hand. If I have to make those style lips I cut them out on the band saw and finish them on the sander. I do not know of any manufacturers that would be willing to sell their lips hence the question of injection molding. I have a quote for 1 lip mold for around $1200.00 for the production of the mold. Then you need to find somoene with injection molding experience with polycarbonate. It is a pretty exspensive thing but if you are going to go into full scale production it might be worth it. Otherwise you are back to square one like me doing it the old way(cheapest way also)

[Skeeter]

BlackJack is right. My quote for a 2 lip mold was $3,500. The molds are rated by the strength of the bands that hold them together. The stronger the mold the more expensive they are. The polycarbonate is in pellet form and loaded into the injection machine. The pellets are heated, melted, and then shot into the mold. You also have to be careful in getting "Clean" pellets. Many of these pellets are not pure. They have stuff mixed in with them. They have different grades of pellets. The more pure, the more expensive. The pressure at which the polycarbonate is shot into the mold is rated by the ton. So there can be alot of expense in this. The man that got me started making crankbaits had his lips done this way. They were really nice. He use to go to the injection company and pick them up in 32 gallon trash bags. He had them by the thousands.

The most economical for guys like us it to have a machine shop come up with a punch. It has either a hand or foot brake. Put your material under the punch, press down and stamp them out. You can have a press and punch made for between 300 and 800 bucks. Then all you have to do is change the punch in the press for different types of lips.
Skeeter

[Siscoe Kid]

Contact this company for a catalog showing a full line of stock lexan and metal diving lips and save yourself the tooling costs . http://www.riverruntackle.com

There also in the lure business. Check out there site for a phone # to contact.