BobP

If you're talking about the soft touch plastic matte finish "skin" like on some Lucky Craft lures, I'd remove it before refinishing.

Super process! This one should be put into the User Submitted Tutorials. Your template is the real deal. Nice work.

Ben, my concern with "wetting out" the hole with epoxy is to increase the bond but also to insure any wood surface that might possibly come in contact with water is protected. I use a set of millimeter bits and a Dremel to drill holes and I like a light friction fit (not too tight) for the screws. All this talk about how to do it is overkill 'cause it doesn't really take much epoxy to grip a wire screw hard enough that it will hold 'til Doomsday. Guess most of us tend to wear a belt PLUS suspenders as far as building wood baits.

I use a piece of thin ss wire to plunge epoxy into the hole, then butter the handmade screw eye with epoxy before I insert it. For one or two baits, I use 30 min epoxy. For large batches, I use Rod Bond epoxy paste. It takes a couple of hours before it begins to set up. I don't think you need to have the hole filled to the brim before you insert the screw eye, you just want the internal surfaces wetted out. There will be enough epoxy in the threads of a handmade screw eye to hold it securely. I've never once had one pulled out of a bait.

I think all the Extreme rods have the BPS weighting system on the butt. It may be that yours just came unscrewed and fell off the rod. BassPro surely has replacements, or you could just use a rubber slip-on butt cap if you prefer.

Re S81. I dip baits in it (I'd say "occasionally" as a hobby builder) and hang them to dry in my garage. Obviously, the stuff contains solvent but I don't think it's anything as poisonous as auto clearcoat. If I were doing it on a production basis, I would ask Dick Nite what precautions they use in his spoon building operation - and I'd seriously consider wearing a mask rated for organic solvents. They aren't expensive. I'd choose a clearcoat based on the final product you want, then work out how to use it safely. S81 works great but it's a very thin film coating and touchy to re-dip baits in if you want multiple coats. Personally, I have no problems with its single coat durability and would not hesitate to sell single coat S81 lures, if that's what I did for a living. I've got lots of commercial factory baits that have less durable clearcoats than S81. Auto clears are made to shoot multiple coats quickly and can produce a thicker film than S81, also with very professional looking results. To a great extent, the final "look" you get with a clearcoat depends on the surface it lays on. The thinner the clearcoat, the smoother the surface must be to have that "high quality factory look". Thicker clears will level out over the surface and can hide small imperfections. So the choice really needs to be integrated into your whole bait building procedure..

I haven't tried it (don't use clears) but don't see why not. If you use it as a barrier coating, it should be stronger than most acrylic clear paints. The discussions I've seen on other sites mentions its use as a "masking agent" - whatever that means!

I had it dry in the packing behind the cup of my Iwata one time and it took some force to pull the needle out of the brush. Not like a grown man can't break it free and pull out the needle, but it was glued in there and that never happened until I started using Pledge. I clean my a/b well at the end of a session but had not been paying enough attention to the barrel, just the cup and front end. Clean between colors as you normally would but rinse the a/b thoroughly after use, and it won't hurt to wipe a drop of oil down the needle. I shoot a little acetone through mine before I put it up to make sure everything is cleaned out. I guess you could use the same chemicals prescribed on the Pledge bottle to clean the a/b but if they include ammonia, it will eventually de-chrome the brush. Bottom line for me is the Pledge works well and it doesn't really take much extra effort to live with it.

I would say Pledge is more a flow enhancer or paint extender rather than a thinning agent. It's viscosity is actually a bit higher than I would use to shoot fine detail. If you look at the video, you'll notice the formula is 50% paint, 30% water, and 20% Pledge. If you thin paint 50% with water, it will likely not form a coherent film when you shoot it on a crankbait. Substitute Pledge for part of the water and you get paint that is 70% acrylic finish and only 30% water. Works pretty smooth. I use it now in most of my Createx colors and like the effect. And it makes your paint go farther. But don't over-do it - 20-25% Pledge is plenty. I haven't noticed pro or con regarding tip drying. It dries to a somewhat harder, more durable film than regular airbrush paint, which is good on the lure but maybe not so good in the airbrush if you have bad cleaning habits.

Nathan, I think you're probably on the right track. The matte LC baits I have are covered in some kind of soft vinyl coating. Looks nice, don't know whether the fish care one bit (suspect they don't though). I haven't heard any pros extolling the virtues of matte finishes as far as fish attraction. The matte finish on my LC baits has proved not to be very durable and peeled off several of the jerkbaits even though they were rarely fished. Question for those who go to the trouble of sanding lures to matte finish: If you wet a sanded epoxy surface, the scratches are filled in and it becomes clear again - so what's the advantage? I just don't see it.

I'll leave it for Bustin Bass to say (or not) but most of the descriptions explicitly say they are Knock-offs and I'd be very surprised to hear they are actual factory Lucky Craft or other brand bodies. You just don't see that happening, even among the lower cost U.S. bait companies, because it runs counter to their commercial interest. The sole exception I know of are some Yo Zuri unpainted bodies you can buy, advertised as factory originals and sold for premium prices.

You could call Coast Airbrush or a similar distributor and find out what parts are needed to make the .5mm tip into a .3mm tip. It will be more than just the needle, I'm sure! One thing that differentiates Iwatas from some other brands is their screw-in paint nozzles. Upside is the nozzle is more precisely aligned than a drop-in cone like you find on many other brands. Downside is the nozzles are expensive - the .2mm nozzle on a HP model is more than $40. If you are happy with your .3mm Chinese a/b, I say no harm, no foul. If it works well, you have a .3mm a/b so do you need another? Personally, I think a .3mm tip (eg, Revolution-B ) or .35mm tip (eg Eclipse) is really the sweet spot for crankbait painting. .3mm is big enough to shoot basecoats, pearls, and flakes but small enough for decent fades and moderate detail. Tip size is important but it's not the only important thing. How precisely the a/b works to control paint flow and how convenient it is to clean are also important. Parts availability ain't a bad thing to have either. It's the rare airbrusher who won't need a new needle or nozzle sometime. It's inherently nice to use high quality equipment and yes, it may make things a little easier. If you're using the best, at least you know the screw ups are your fault and not your equipment's JMHO, the main thing that improves your airbrushing over time is practice, the development of control, and just learning the ropes of how to paint crankbaits. That takes awhile regardless of the a/b.

I can't compare a Revolution B to an Eclipse but I can compare it to a more expensive HP-B and they both are high quality. I'm sure the Eclipse rates just as well because guys who use them like them. As far as Iwata goes, I say pick based on the tip size and features you want and buy with confidence. I was afraid the Revolution B might be a lesser airbrush than my HP when I ordered it because it was cheap at $70. But I was pleasantly surprised. Iwata prices mostly depend on the tip size. The smaller the tip, the more expensive the airbrush because it has to be manufactured with higher precision in order to work properly. My only question about Iwata quality is about their new entry level brush that I hear is being manufactured in China versus Japan. I'd want to hear some user reviews before I considered that one.

My answer is ... none. I can build baits that hunt but I can't modify baits that won't hunt to make them do it. I think you're talking about lip trimming? In my experience, baits that hunt tend to have more lip area than ones that don't, so taking away material is usually not gonna help. I know some old style custom builders trim the lips on their baits to get them "right" but I'm guessing they built them with oversize lips if trimming is part of their build process. Ben, re commercial baits. I gotta wonder why KVD has a swimming pool in his backyard. And how many baits does Strike King send him to yield the baits he actually throws in tournaments? Think about this stuff long enough and it will drive you mad.

Sorry, I didn't mean my post as a counter-point to yours, Whittler. My point is that crankbaits are complicated and they operate in a very complicated environment, and it's not easy to isolate "bass attraction factors" in a scientific way. Yours was among the more rigorous tests I've read about and I appreciate the time and effort it required. Here's a true to life scenario: I have 2 crankbaits that catch more fish for me on my home lake, and one of their common features is a similar crawdad pattern. They are different in every other factor but I think their actions, though quite different, are among the "best of the best" within their respective category of crankbait. So what's causing the bass to bite? Action or color? Personally, I usually lean toward action. But there's no rigorous scientific way to prove it. I sure ain't touching them babies and take a chance on messing them up! And maybe action + color = more bites than either factor alone.

When fishermen test a hard bait and make conclusions about any of the factors, including color, it needs to be taken with a big grain of salt. Their tests can never be valid experiments designed to get reliable information about which color, etc works better. Why? Because there are too many variables that are unknown and completely out of the control of the fisherman. If you control everything about the lure, the fisherman, his equipment, and his fishing presentation (and this is vanishingly rare in the "experiments" I read about), there are still a huge number of variables about the environment and the behavior of the fish that you cannot control. Many of those variables are complete unknowns. Are there more fish there? Are they active? If not, what's their mood? If you just caught one on lure X, does that affect whether other bass are more likely or less likely to bite the same lure again, or bite lure Y? Did the water clarity, oxygen content, current, lighting, and cover situation remain exactly the same between lures and between casts? Are there bass sociology factors working that you never even dreamed of? JMHO, it will always be a mystery to some degree and that's fine. That keeps things interesting! If fishing were a dead certainty, I wouldn't be a fisherman. I listen when knowledgeable fishermen with deep experience on a particular body of water suggest particular lures, colors, etc. I don't rush to the local bait shop to get one "just like his" but I'll think about it and adapt their lure choice and presentation to my own little fishing universe and see what happens. Sometimes it can be a shortcut to a more productive day. Sometimes it will just lead you astray.

Epoxies cure in a wide range of temperatures. They're formulated for a nominal 70 degrees but I've topcoated in 40 degrees and 90+ degrees with no problems. Cooler temps will slow down the cure but it's by hours, not days. You will need to rotate the lures for longer at less than 70 degrees. If you are concerned, you can take the lure turner inside the house after coating. It takes about a week (at nominal 70 degrees) for most epoxies to truly reach final cure state but in a practical sense, it's impossible to tell a difference in a lure coated 3 day ago versus one coated 3 months ago. If you measured it correctly and mixed it very well (and these are critical).... it's gonna cure.

I don't think it's one feature versus another. It's all features taken together. However, for me, there's a ranking of their attraction power on most days, on most bodies of water, and for most bass species: 1 - depth 2 - action 3 - color pattern 4 - bait size That's just gut feeling - no science. And retrieve style/speed is as important as any factor. You hear guys say they got bit on a particular color only if they put a 1 mm purple dot on the tail, or some-such story. That kind of stuff is worthless anecdotal information. Even with a minimum variety of baits with 4 factors covered, we're talking at least 54 baits (3 depths x 3 actions x 3 color patterns x 2 sizes). I try to keep that kind of selection in the boat but remind myself that you can't get bit unless your line is wet. Flounder around too long trying hard baits and your day is zeroed.

I've been one of the TUers who regularly wales on plastic knock-offs, and for good reason. As a class, I find them mostly uninspiring and often unfishable. However, I keep sampling a few and recently got several KO's from Bustin Bass Baits because they appear to have some decent INTERNAL construction as well as copying the commercial baits' external looks. Today I test fished them and was happy with the results. Didn't catch any fish (it was a soft plastics kind of day) but I was satisfied with how the KO's performed. Here's a short review on each. All were fished with #4 trebles (short shank for the Crankster and SR-X, regular size for the Deps BuzzJet). Caveat: I only tried these 3 from the Bustin Bass lineup and can't comment on their other models. Sebile Crankster (medium) KO - A medium action 3-5' slow floating diver. Casts well at around 1/2 oz. The bait has 2 compartmented ballast balls, one in front and one directly behind the belly hanger, plus a small glass bead in a rear chamber. Moderate high pitched rattle from the glass bead. Megabass SR-X KO - A hard thumping wide action shallow 2' diver. Weighs about 1/2 oz and casts well. The ballast is a compartmented ball near the belly hanger plus a lead strip that is captured in the lower rear of the bait. Not much rattle but not silent either. It's 'claim to fame' is an open compartment in the nose of the bait with 2 forward holes in the nose to take in water, outlet holes on each side of the nose, plus large outlet holes incorporated into the eye recesses. The bait comes with half-round 3D eyes to fit its unique eye recess. There is also a water "funnel" on the bottom rear of the bait with a wide intake and a narrower outlet. And there are 2 small side "wings" like a Timber Tiger crankbait. Don't know what the fish think yet, but the water chambers are interesting hydrodynamic features. Deps BuzzJet Jr KO - A 2 3/4" wake bait with both a lip and a rear prop. The body shape resembles a small bass. One medium compartmented ballast ball in front of the belly hanger, two medium balls behind the hanger running in a sloped tunnel from the tail to the hanger for weight shift on the cast. The medium size prop resembes those on Heddon Torpedoes. This bait has very wide action, virtually like a walk-the-dog Spook but without the work - you just crank it back to the boat. It puts out a nice wake plus a bubble trail from the prop. It casts well and the rear ballast balls create a pretty loud rattle. How do these baits compare to the originals? I have no idea 'cause I don't own the originals. They all performed very well. The 3D exterior detail I would rate a "B". All baits were neatly welded with few if any external faults. They arrived 3 days after ordering. Bottom line, these are some of the best unpainted plastic baits I've seen in terms of construction and performance, and I have zero complaints. That's rare! My compliments to Bustin Bass.

Maybe not ideal but a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. I paint outside in all weather and humidity. I use a hair dryer to speed dry the paint so I can move on to the next color. No running or failure of the paint to stick. Adhesion of water based paint is only moderate and it will not survive prolonged submersion. Topcoat is what keeps it on the lure.

Some guys use an adhesion promoter like Bulldog before they lay down a white (or whatever) color basecoat. I just wipe them down with denatured alcohol to remove any grease or dirt. JMHO there's no reason to use solvent based primer on unpainted plastic crankbaits. That stuff is meant to improve adhesion for solvent based paint on metal surfaces, not for water based paint on plastic. And it often will leave your baits with a strong solvent smell that I REALLY dislike. If you shoot lacquer (you didn't say), disregard the above. The final topcoat is what keeps paint on baits painted with water based paint.

One basic to mention about braid that's easy to forget - Always put some mono on the spool before you spool on the braid. Braid has no stretch so it will not grip the spool like mono. Without mono backing and under strain, it will spin on the spool and you will think your drag has failed. One braid gripe occurred to me while fishing yesterday. I was trying braid with a fluoro leader to fish an unweighted Super Fluke. With mono or fluoro, you can usually feel a bite on a plastic bait even if the fish picks it up and swims toward the boat. With braid, that isn't so. It's very strong when pulled but if you push on braid, the weave basically collapses and transmits no vibration up the line. It also floats so it's not ideal for fishing plastics with light or no weight, IMO. JMHO, braid is great for fishing plastics or moving baits like a lipless crankbait in heavy grass. Otherwise, I'd rather be throwing fluorocarbon.

I haven't used it but have a bottle of Pearlizing Medium that is probably ready-mixed pearl in a clear acrylic base you can use with any color. I assume it will lighten the hue because it adds a silvery white sheen. I use iridescent paints like Createx Electric Blue. Not sure they are really color shift paints but they have more shine and "pop' than regular pearls. I mix them with regular colors to tone down the iridescence a bit and because the Electric Blue is a very strong dark blue. For instance, Electric Blue and the lighter Caribbean Blue mix to make an attractive medium blue. I don't think pearl paints are made from colored pearl pigments; I think they are standard pigments mixed with a pearlizing medium. In my experience, they mix up just like regular colors. Mixing paint is more art than science. IMO, you just have to experiment and see what happens.

You've tried the most durable and easy to apply - Dick Nite S81 moisture cured urethane. The other thing I've tried is epoxy but it has several downsides. Harder to apply of course since it must be brushed on, but it also draws away from sharp edges, which means the spoon's edges will have minimal protection and the epoxy can quickly chip off there. Personally, I wouldn't dream of using anything else but S81. After all, it is custom formulated for dipping spoons.

Pearls are standard colors with a pearlizing medium added to give the pearl effect. You should be able to mix them without a problem. Blue + yellow = green, but you can add pearl white to dark pearl green to lighten it up too. You can also buy bottles of "pearlizing medium" to make standard colors pearlescent. So there are several ways to go, you just have to experiment.