Latest Crawlers

Just got done with these today , made them in terms of a lure swap .

Don't have much experience with such topwater baits , in fact I have built only one so far , also with homemade wings of 0,5 mm stainless steel sheet , but that one works quite well .

It also has this slotted wing attachement like I did on these ones , but here I have made the "U"-shaped wing hinge of thicker stainless sheet(1,0 mm) , since I assume , that on the first lure it was too thin(0,5 mm) and its limiting flaps might bent backward under the pressure of the wings to open them further up after a while of use .

Due to that thicker material I could not bend the limiting flap forward to proper position after screwing the hinge on , had to do it before in a vise .

So I had to drill a hole through the wings to get the mounting screw through , since I couldn't move the wing backward far enough anymore to access the front screw .

During my first bath tub tests I have found , that the wings closed too far over the nose of the lures , thus did not open anymore , the oncoming current pushed them together , not opened them up .

So as spacers , to render the wings more open , I have placed some cup washers under the front mounting screws , ground them to fit for proper spacing of the wings towards the nose of lures . Now the water pushes between body and wings to open them up properly .

The crawlers finally did work that way in my bath tub , but maybe some more tuning of the wings has to be done outdoors , with pliers I can still carefully bent the limiting flaps wider open to increase the wings opening angle , if neccessary .

Due to the large play of this slotted wing construction , these lures generate a lot of metallic clicking sound in addition to the dull blob-blob-blob-blob sound , as the wings dig into the water .

The bigger crawler is about 5 1/2" , the smaller , jointed one about 1" shorter , both lures are thu-wired through a center bore and have a "figure eight 90