Bentrod425

Pre-heat the molds first. OR pour a bunch of blanks without hooks/pins to heat up the mold before adding your hooks/pins.

Same here. Works pretty well for larger spinners.

UV clearcoat

I've been using braid with a 6'-8' section of lighter test mono or flouo tied to the end as a "bumper" or leader. This allows for easy cutting and tying on of new terminal tackle and if I get hung up will break before the braid preventing braid from being deposited in our waters. Works well, but depending on type of water/species, full on mono works well.

Diagonal cutters and then a light file to touch up the flat spot.

For my Do-it mold I put it on my melting pot, but for some of my smaller custom molds I picked up a used toaster oven off of my local Buy Nothing FB group. I use that to heat my molds and keep them hot. It also doubles as a curing oven for after powder coating jigs.

They spin because there isn't enough weight to counteract the inertia of the blade. You may try using a heavier spinner body or and offset-weight spinner body that's crimped to the thruwire. There was a spinner made a while back that had a body similar to a rooster tail, but the wire went through it at a slight angle resulting in a 'bottom weighted' style spinner.

Look at gold nail foil transfer. You can adhere it to the jig with most any type of tacky glue or epoxy and then epoxy clear coat over the top. Warning, nail polish or poly acrylic will damage the nail foil finish.

Sorry, not familiar with that one. I'm near Seattle.

I've never had a single hook act as a rudder. Worst case is maybe the single hook isn't as heavy as a treble, so doesn't balance the spinner correctly, but I use a lot of single swiwash hooks on spinners here in the PNW and am rarely disappointed.

Great idea and good tip!

Home made or store-bought, a bobbin is a useful tool. I have a cheap one that came with my childhood fly tying kit. It isn't perfect, but works well enough for my imperfect flies and jigs.

I used some from one of those my daughter got...the feathers were definitely not as good quality/condition as the ones I bought from he fly shop, but they did work for some fly tying applications.

Sounds like either too thick of paint or not enough air pressure. These two can be interchangeable. Watch some videos on thinning paint. I like mine about as thick as heavy cream or half and half. Air pressure to the brush will vary between 20-40 psi. Really watered down or thin paints will use less air pressure and thicker syrupy paints will need more. I find I tend to stick to about 30psi these days. I like to thin with a little 90% alcohol and createx thinning solution, but water will do in a pinch.

I recently got into this hobby myself. I got a Master airbrush kit (G233) off Amazon for about $40. I already had a shop air compressor and ended up buying a Master mini-regulator/moisture trap to place inline ($15). I did end up having to go to the hardware store and buy some fittings to get the whole setup the way I wanted, but in the end I have a quick connect from my compressor to the moisture trap/mini-regulator and that is screwed to my workbench and stays connected to my airbrush. I DO recommend having the mini-regulator with air pressure gauge as i feel like it's much more precise than the air pressure gauge/regulator on the compressor itself, but I'm sure it's not absolutely necessary. For paints, you don't HAVE to go buy specialized airbrush paints. You can buy plain water-based acrylic paints and thin with water, alcohol or store-bought thinner. The Createx are nice as they are mostly good to go out of the container, but I've found some variability there too depending on how I want it to spray/laydown. You'll end up changing up air pressure between various paints as well (that's where that mini-regulator comes in handy. I've been extremely happy with my Master airbrush. So far it's performed very well. Also, being inexpensive I don't stress as much about messing it up. P.S.- The $40 G233 kit came with three needle/nozzle sizes (0.2, 0.3, 0.5). The 0.3 was installed and I've yet to swap it out, so you could save some $ and get just the airbrush itself with one needle.