LaPala

I'm curious to know what the "slight" diff will be too Jed, a formula would be great. When u're at it sink the whole lure into water and measure how much water it displaces before & after. I would expect the "slight" to be not so slight as volume (of cylinder) is calculated as a square of radius just a 1/2mm increace in radius would add up pretty quickly too. Plus that glob of epoxy is already a bigger blob to start with compared to the same weight glob of a piece of lead.

This is what I did with the lips on my Arrow Seeker, anywhere close to what u're thinking finlander?

Finlander: I have toyed with the shifting weight as u describe, embeded in a V ahaped chamber across the lure but it doesn't seem to help much & caused more problems as the shifting cannot be that controlled in various retrieve rates. It's worse when the lure is bouncing of rocks & stuff as then the deflection willl cause the shifting weight to temperoriry be lodged to one side & blow out the lure. If u restrict the shifting weight movement too much then it might as well be fixed. Play with fixed weighting, lip config, lure shape & line tie position instead. From my experiements, getting a bait to hunt is like what everyone is saying: "It's a lure on the verge of being unbalanced" and everything has to be constructed very accurately. The line tie position especially has to be dead centre. I think why hunting lure is so hard to make is because experienced lure makers are so good at making their lures perform well & very stable. We have designed it to not hunt.

NO JED!!! You forgot Archimedes, weight does not determine bouyancy, it's density of the medium. I'd expect the same weight of clear coat to be of a bigger volume compared to lead. SO there will be a slight difference.

When Red gets those soft-plastic paints into TU supply shop, this would be my choice: 1. Pearl-white 2. Clear with silver glitter 3. A 12 color set of SP Paint & a brush. :grin: :grin: :grin: :grin: :grin:

WAY COOL RED. Now that's just leave the WHEN question

Been waiting for this stuff for a loooooooooong time Jerry I'll be waiting for ya to put it in the supply shop. It can be spray thru a a/brush or needs to be brushed on?

F/Tiger: If you're using Devcon, then the clear can be tinted with thinner based paint, just a drop or 2 should be enough. No need to search for the black ones (opens up ur creative thinkering too if u use transperant (candy) paint & tint it moderately to let the clear just have a hint of color.) One other thing, try putting ur stickers on the head of a nail, then if u have slight excess epoxy on ur eye, it's easier to trim off & not over flow the sticker circle & stick to whatever surface u have it on.

Hey NOT FAIR!!! I don't have any of the fisshy u mentioned :grin:

Thanks guys for the feedback on Lure Testers & the PM's too. You guys are right, I'm the creater of my lures and I should know what's best for those lures. We do design lures for a particular situation/condition and/or species not to mention some lure I make do have a how to use it clause too . Getting a lure out into the world is to expose it to more varied conditions. Ppl using them would just have to find out where and how it will work for them. :grin: I should not worry about ppl who expect to throw a crank out, reel it back & expect to catch fish consistantly with it. woodieb8: Thanks for the pointer as well, guess that would be the way to go if I plan to go comercial with my lures. Get it to the ones who really matters.

I've been making lures for sometime now & I am usually also the field tester besides passing on some to frieds for trials. But feed back are not always as detail or informative as I would've like it to be. I don't trust myself as I know my own lures and how to fish it to it's best advantage including it's flaws so I can be highly biased & productive at the same time with my ownn lures. 1) Do any of u have a premade field testing form or suggestions as what should the standard feedback be? 2) And what are the criterias for selecting a field tester? Thanks in advance for helping me out guys.

I'm stuck with my CorelDraw as well Hard to teach an old dog new tricks as familiarity with a program does make us reluctant to switch. That said, this would be a good alternative to spendy programs for those who'd like to have more consistant & flexible lure pattern designing tool.

Recently InkScape (http://www.inkscape.org/screenshots/index.php) came to my attention as it has just released Ver0.42 and the functionality is already rivalling those commercial programs. It'd be a great tool to add to your lure making arsernal for drawing, scanning then tracing lure outlines... etc. And being vector base, you can scale ur drawings to any size without losing anything as oppose to graphics programs.

A SMD Reworking Station is a good alternative to regular heat guns for small stuff. Available from electronics shop. However Husky's solution would be best if u need to work in a hurry, or bending polycarbonate in ur mother-in-law's house??? :grin:

I have some patterns in my lure gallery: http://www.pbase.com/sebarau/mylures u're welcome to use them as a guide or u can save them to ur puter & resize them to suit you. I use CorelDraw to draw them but those in galery are just jpegs. (Like Dovwel said) any old version of vector based graphic program is a great help in drawing templates pattern (well there's a learning curve for vector base programs) A neat trick to copy existing lure pattern is to just snap a photo of it's profile square on then import that photo into ur vector graphics program & trace out the outline (take the pic of lure against a clean background helps). U can of course grab some pics from the web as well. After u have the outline traced, u can tweak the shape/size to ur hearts delight. (see my Lure Shape variation post) I'd recommand u tweak the shape/profile to ur own designs as I do not encourage copying. Afterall you're going to build lure from scratch so why not ur own original input be put to it too. Here's a search link to some free vector base programs Have fun thinkering.

See this DIY Paint Booth article: http://www.interlog.com/~ask/scale/tips/booth.htm

Here are the pics

HAIL, Welcome Skeeter the new MOD. Can he be impartial in some epoxy post heh heh, just kindding ya Skeeter, I know you're a fair guy. And thank Tim for his contributions. Hope you'll still have time to post us great tips

Thanks for sharing that info fatfingers. This makes somethings connect for me. Been a while since I've settle down to the Rapala ShadRap Crawdad (CW) & Goldfish (GF) color pattern as most productive for Jungle Perch. Incidentally, CW is an orangish brown & GF is bright gold based fluro orange..... I might try ur formula & combine the two Maybe then I don't have to decide each time which lure to throw first then

Pretty neat trick Coley. Thanks for sharing it. I wonder if u ever had one heated can going KABOOOM on ya while heating Seriously, one question, How do u get repeatable results from this mixing?

SpoRoller: U're embarassing me with ur compliment :oops: I'm sure u guys are more knowledgeble in this area than I am. I'm just sharing some tid-bits I found out. Since then I've been talking (bugging actually ) a local artist who mixes his own colors and boy it's like taking a degree course again. Color Theory, product knowledge... damn I wish I was ignorant & can just pick up a spray can labelled red & spray my red throat. Now that I know, well it just opened up another Pandora's Box on colors for me. Fatfingers: Love what u did with the plastic lure & the paint color. Any theory behind your copper orange combination?? Orange is a killer color for a few species over here as well. But now I know there's more than just plain orange that's the trigger.

I have bee lookin thru a DuPont Mastertint System paint mixing manual for auto paint, from the information of the base colors(tints) used to create all the other color here's an example of what I found out (from the manual descriptions): Color Red AM55 (Light Red): transperant red tint, saturated yellow tone at all angles. AM58 (Deep Maroon): Equal to AM55 but redder, bluer, dirtier AM62 (Transperant Red): Clean blue toned red AM64 (Magenta): Blue toned red, transparent tint, more saturated & more transperant than AM66 the most reddish red tint at side on angle AM66 (Red Violet): The most desaturated blue toned red There are like 100s more including metalics & pearls, not to mention u mix these mastertints to create other colors inbetween. But in a nut shell, red is not red and so it goes for other colors. Blue can have greenish or yellow tint, etc etc.... The effect of these colors are not the same when viewed at different angles relative to the light source direction & viewing angle. Perhaps something for u guys to ponder when getting ur next paint Would the fish like a blue with green undertone or a yellow undertone?? or If my black really is black afterall, Dang this is confusing LOL. NOT ALL COLORS ARE CREATED EQUAL it all depends on the manufacturers and what type of based it's mixed(created from), I think this is part of the reason why some similiar color schemes with one catching fish & other not as productive -- different paints!!. PS: I for one will want a AM8 Graphite black for my black from now on ---- Transparent Black, gives a satiny yellow-red appearance in head on and side on angle. Or I'm gonna get that auto paint guy to create me a black with red tint and blue undertone

Jed, Siebler Custome Bait beat you to the 1000th mark ages ago and he's still as active as a mustand in heat. Keep up with the good stuff u post Jed, it'd leave avoid in TU if u held back.

YES & NO Nathan. In my quest to make my Seeker lure a better fish catching machine, I studied the older versions where some are what u call imperfections, those struggling ones that seem a little more erratic, hard to tune & "natural' swimming action. I started to tweak & change things a bit here and there. And the end result is my Arrow Seeker. It's got a new lip, new weighting configuration & slight tweaks to the overall balancing of the lure & I have a struggleing erratic lure. I learnt a few lessons in weighting along the way, & here's a hint: weighting as we always extol to be at the bottom 1/3 is not necessary the ultimate truth. Weight a lure to the verge of tipping over, design a lip to match & voila an erratic (hunting??) lure. SO this is a designed imperfect lure. Perfect every time. LOL if I'm making sense here. Here are links to the lures mentioned: Original Seeker, New erratic Arrow Seeker, Arrow Seeker with it's first catch (btw this pic shows the more conventional one without details carvings, painted but without top coat cause I was to eager to try it out )

Hey Husky, late reply here I wanted to but still looking for a supply of the tissue papers. Only ones I found were the seperating pages from my kid's stamp aalbum & some from glossy catelogues. Will try & show u the results once I find the time to get to it. LOL, if I ever will. So little time, so many things to do.