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Really all I can say to this is take your time. Spend longer than any man should when it comes to getting the slot straight. I have ran into issues like that, and I use a dovetail saw. Mark the slot before you cut it. Cut it smaller than it has to be and file/sand it to size.

Hi everyone, I'm new to making lures and I just made a wooden fat belly minnow lure. Its 6 inches long made out of pine. Its a top water lure with a lip that I want it to go about 5 to 8 ft deep. So I'm at the point where I'm gluing lead weight to the belly to find that perfect floating height in the water. No matter how much weight I place the lure leans on its right side. All the sides look even, I tried placing the weight in numerous locations...its weird and I'm starting to the one side of the wood is heavier even though it looks even. Any help would be appreciated. Also one more question. I'm finding that when I make wooden lures the weight of the lures I make are never the same weight in the store bought lures. Meaning if I buy a 6 inch lure in the store its light as a feather and If I was to try and make the same lure mine would weight much heavier. I know its probably different material, wood type ect...but Its hard to explain, its like a different feeling of weight if that makes sense. I don't really feel the weight with store bought lures. Thank everyone in advance...

Use Christmas ornament wire hangers and hang the jigs by the eye. Allen

Excellent point sir!

I don't mean to stir this boiling pot, but I am old enough and fish enough that I have had several lures break in my day. Funny, they were normally the older two piece cheep molded lures or the through wire balsa lures. I have had the OLD wooden lures that had the poor seal coats have screws rust out, and I have had a few Lucky Craft Live Pointers where the "through wire" on the multiple joints broke. But....... Guys, they are lures, not bridges. If a few break, people don't die.

Same experiences when cutting baits open. I want my lures to last but think of lures being more of a consumable product. If wanting to build something more bulletproof then I jump to 2 part polyurethane foams as water intrusion is no longer and issue and can still get a very "lively" bait. I really never have had many issues with balsa but don't build near the baits I do with basswood and no where in numbers as I used to do. D-Baits.... brings back some good memories.

UKandy I have disected many baits, and alot of balsa line thru baits are not sealed properly, or should I say sealed for structural strength in mind, normaly they epoxy the line thru channel but do nothing to the balsa to make it stronger, so it's rather easy to tear the line through out of the bait either upwards or forwards, once the line through starts to tear slightly it will let water into the bait which will eventually cause catastophic damage. I twist my own line tie with stainless steel wire and epoxy it into hardwood dowells that are then epoxied into the balsa body which is sealed to my standards and have yet had a line tie fail or lost a fish because of a bad line tie, My line, hooks or split rings will fail before my bait fails. Hope that helps, but with Bass sized Balsa baits I see absolutly no need to build line through.

I have built both, but as I am only building for my own use, I see no point in through wire. Having said that, when I make a new design, I test to destruction well beyond the limits of what the lure will ever face in the water. Yes, I prefer twisted eyes. There is a lot of engineering to twisted eyes. I would NEVER use a plain haywire twist, always a spaced out barrel twist. It is all about the glue surface area. It is the shear strength at the surface of the glue plug multiplied by the surface area that determines the load that the eye will take. The barrel twist makes sure that the wire form will not pull out of the glue plug, the haywire form is too smooth to call secure. Some will argue with me but I have logic and testing on my side. Dave

Yep, learned that a long time ago when I started to paint jigs and I painted and baked 100 jigs. After I took them out they looked so beautiful, then I realized I didn't clear the eyelets. So I thought no big deal, I'll just poke them through with a jig eye buster. Wrong, that didn't work because the paint was so hard. Had to work at it for a long time and that job was a money loser for me. Way too many hours to clean out the eyes. Never forgot again.