[drake]

I know I've seen this somewhere else on here, but I can't find it right now. I'm trying my first foil finish bait this week. All was going good until I tried to topcoat the foil with epoxy before some of my paint was dry. (I put a base coat on before foiling so less paint would be required after foiling) Anyway a slight amount of the bas coat smeared in with the devcon. How do I go about cleaning this blemish up? I was thinking of trying to buff it out with some steel wool. Any suggestions?

[TBait]

Did you clearcoat the balsa and then foil and paint directly to the foil? Were there scale indentations in the foil if you did paint directly to the foil? If this is the case, I think I would just start over. Or spray the bait in a solid color pattern and topcoat again.

If you topcoated over the foil before you painted, you may be able to sand the area out and repaint. However, I doubt that you will get it back to perfect. My experience is that when you clearcoat the bait again after sanding and repainting that there is a difference in depth.. the clearcoat brings the depth out.

Look are you building lures to catch fish, or are you building lures as a hobby artist? If a bait is used it will get its dings and teeth marks, they dont have to be pefect to catch fish. In fact I doubt fish see half the details that get put into baits even in gin clear water. The bait is moving to fast for the details to be seen. The details are for selling the bait to the fisherman.

I always clearcoat over the foil before painting. That way if I make a mistake with waterbase paints, You just wipe away and repaint.

Heatsetting appears to be a issue with several of the topcoats.... it must be done. Etex,Devcon, Dick Nites....all 3 require this.

Post a pic and let us look at it..... worse case if the foil is ruined, Spray whitepearl over the whole body and work on a new paints scheme and topcoat it.

Mike

[drake]

The bait I am working on is a plastic bait I was looking to refinish. I have not worked on any wooden baits as of yet. I used the foil tape, and after I had it applied I shot a white base coat on the top and bottom of the lure where the tape did not meet so that I could have a better color to start with than the original color of the bait. I did no detail in the foil... simply applied the tape and smoothed it very good. When I applied my epoxy a small portion of the base coat had not dried and mixed with the epoxy. So I now have a noticeable smear in the finish. I considered going on with my planned paint scheme and leaving the blemish alone, since this is a test bait anyway. But if it was easy to remove a blemish like this I thought I would go ahead and get rid of it. Can't provide a picture since I'm at work...

[TBait]

Your choice...What type of plastic bait? If it was a luckycraft I might be tempted to sand the clearcoat away and reapply foil and repaint. But for a 3-4 dollar bait, you are going to be putting alot of elbow grease in.

How big is the smear and where is it at? Can you live with it. Ruined baits are part of the learning process. Can the smear be covered by anything you are spraying in the rest of the pattern?

I am assuming that you would have another coat of devcon going over the finished bait. 2 coats of devcon over a plastic bait may be adding quite a bit of weight. Might be enough to change the action or kill the action.