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@21xdc, I tried that on some cheep hooks but they didn't look quite right. I'll still stick with bending wire if I don't find produced counterparts. @BigEpp, Should have mentioned, those aren't mine. I grabbed that pic off the net somewhere. I am going for that vintage look though, gotta get on my wife to carve them out for me, she's the wood worker. @Mark, The little farts seem love them. Just wait till you get them in the boat and they want to play with them while your trying to fish. Great times! Anyone else have some fun alternative uses for their lures since were on the subject? Great idea for bath toys, I'll need to pass a couple over to the new fisherman we have in the family!

RIP Del.....one of the best .......

You can get just about any lure design to swim but talking guaranteed SUCCESSFUL designs, I favor copying actual commercial baits. If you build them for your own fishing and not for sale, it’s no sin. I started copying baits by simply tracing a pic and working from there. That was not sufficient to get a good copy. What you need to do is buy a bait and get exact measures and weights. That’s needed especially to copy the cross-sectional shape of the body and get a finished target weight. From there, it’s a straightforward process of weighing components and subtracting the total from the target weight to get the ballast needed. I estimate 1/50th ounce for the bait’s finish. All done, you can get a creditable copy that weighs within 1/50th of an ounce of the original and has a good chance of performing as well. It should be noted that this method works best on copies of WOOD baits, not plastic, where the variable internal body structure can’t really be duplicated in wood. My favorites are custom wood baits like the classic D-bait and the WEC E1, which are fairly pricey balsa baits that are no longer available commercially.