Dock Shuey

I ordered a sheet of 16 gauge stainless steel for another project and had some scraps laying around so I decided to make my first lure. It's a 5 inch long, asymmetrical spoon. I slapped some sharpie on it and it looks very homemade, but I think if I can dial in a good action it will certainly catch some fish. I'm gonna try it out on snook, jacks, bluefish and whatever else is around here in South Florida.

As a disclaimer, you probably shouldn't put flammable material like wood inside an oven and leave it unattended, and you should also look up the flashpoint or autoignition temperature of whatever you're working with. I have used a 300 degree oven to dry black walnut, sitka spruce, red cedar, padauk, mango, goncalo alves and eastern hard maple without any problems. Nevertheless, don't burn down your house and then say I told you it was safe to do so!

The temperature inside the oven is so high compared to the atmosphere that the relative humidity is dropped to essentially zero.

Absolutely right. Green wood should have its ends painted and then stickered and allowed to air dry for one year per inch of thickness for the home wood processor. Torrefiying the wood is generally done at near ignition temperatures and is the reason the oxygen must be removed from the atmosphere. Torrefied wood darkens throughout because there is a slight burning of the wood which is why it turns brittle. But it retains or even increases its strength to weight ratio which makes it good for guitar making. As it relates to lure making, wood that has been dried to 0% moisture content loses most of its ability to reabsorb moisture and so won't expand and contract and crack finishes as easily as wood that still swells in humid environments.

I've built a lot of different things over the years. Mostly guitars and more recently it's been furniture like entry tables. I've picked up welding over the last couple years. Very novice, but I do a good enough job to make leg sets for tables. I built a boat when the covid thing started and sold it after its maiden voyage. And I'm also into jiu jitsu, which I like to describe as the art of folding clothes... While people are still wearing them.

Torrification is a more involved process that uses higher temperatures and a zero oxygen environment, but for the average home woodworker the results are more or less the same. Bringing the moisture content of wood down to zero makes it much more resistant to future changes in humidity. In some woods, particularly the spruces, bringing the moisture content to zero with heat causes the wood's resins to crystallize and gives the wood a higher strength to weight ratio, but also makes it more brittle. The only reason I know about this stuff is because most of my woodworking experience has been in building guitars. Using the heated drying process on the spruce soundboard of an acoustic guitar gives an instrument that has a more desirable tone and is much less prone to deformation due to humidity changes.

You can dry pieces of wood in a regular home oven pretty quickly. I put wood for all my guitar bodies and necks in at 300(f) and leave them in overnight. In the morning I turn the oven off and then take the wood out later in the day. Everything comes out dry and very stable. But this process "crystalizes" wood, some species more than others. This crystallization brings out good properties for tonewoods in guitars but does tend to make them more brittle than normal. This might not be ideal for carving.

Hey everybody... Just signed up after looking around on this site quite a bit over the last few months. I've been tying flies my whole life but never made a lure of any kind. I'm gonna give it a shot and see what happens. Been building guitars and furniture for a long time, started welding a year ago and have built a boat as well. We'll see what happens. I'm gonna start with a few spoons and see what happens.