BobP

The solvent in DN is pretty active stuff. You don't want wet DN on a lure too long or it will wrinkle the paint. The simplest method I've found is to dip the bait and hang it up so the excess DN drips off the tail. This works well and couldn't be easier - dip it, hang it, walk away! I haven't tried short interval redipping so can't predict results. I dip bass baits once. They dry over several hours, at which point the poly is about as tough as a typical polyurethane (not very!) Then you let them rest for at least several days so the moisture cure process can make the finish very durable. The optimum cure period is reportedly about a week. I used to do two dips with at least 24 hrs between dips to prevent bubbles and wrinkles. That worked OK but I get good results with just one dip - the baits fish just fine and are as durable as factory baits. Some guys brush on multiple coats, some guys shoot it thinned through an airbrush. So there are options; this is just the way I like to do it.

Beauty is as beauty does! If the GX207 works well, you're set. I'm less enthusiastic about the compressor. You can get a decent tool compressor at most home centers for $100 or less that will generate 100+ psi and has a 2-3 gallon storage tank so the compressor doesn't need to run all the time. A pressure regulator (often included) and a moisture trap and you're in business for about $150 with more capability than you would have with the compressor you cited. Of course, where you will be painting and how much noise you will be generating can be a consideration. But it's something to think about.

You aren't running a factory that can zip unpainted baits through an automated painting line staffed by 3rd world labor at the rate of 5,000 per day. So the original cost of the bait has nothing to do with custom bait painting. If the customer wants a $6 paint job, let him go buy some $6 factory baits. It's likely that the customer has beat up baits whose color patterns have been great producers for him but which he can't get any longer from the factory because they changed the pattern or the lure. Or they're "special baits" which are priceless to him because they're the ones that catch fish when other stuff won't. Balance that against what you want to get out of custom bait painting and pick a price.

I like Venture Brite-Bak foil tape, but haven't seen the Bagley color you refer to. The gold Brite-Bak is actually more brass color and I prefer using the silver foil and overspraying it with transparent yellow Createx to get a bright yellow gold metallic. I think you can probably play with the silver to get a more subtle gold color value, if that's what you're looking for. Brite-Bak is thin with good adhesive backing and it conforms well to 3D detail on plastic baits, or takes scale embossing well on wood baits. Its margins are unobtrusive. Here's where I got some but there are other online sources: http://www.sunshineglass.com/rcol/i-proj/mosaic-access-vent.htm

Good deal? It depends on whether the bottles are the 2 oz or the 4 oz size, how full are the bottles, and whether the paint has ever been frozen. But the main question is whether the colors that he's selling are the colors YOU want on your crankbaits.

Personal preference but I like the small cup on the Revolution BR. I almost never thin airbrush paint so squirting a little more in the cup if needed is no issue. And I'm often dripping 2-3 drops of paint into the brush for small details on crankbaits. To me, that cup is "right sized" for crankbaits. The tip on my Revolution BR is .3mm and that's big enough for all the airbrush pearls and flakes I've tried. The Iwatas are not designed to change tip sizes like the Paasche VL or Badger 170T kit brushes. Other models in the Revolution series have different tip sizes suited to the cup size of that model. larger cups = larger tips. I don't know if you can buy a large tip off a different model Revolution and put in on a BR. But futzing around with the tiny paint nozzles on the Iwatas is not smart. The are smaller than grains of rice and quite easy to lose or damage, and expensive to replace. Larger tips is a non-issue to me because I've never needed one when painting cranks with my BR .3mm.

I think it's usually caused by contamination of the lure surface with something containing oil, like your fingerprints. Moral - don't eat potato chips while clear coating baits.

Yeah, many brands have been used successfully to coat crankbaits. JMHO, any epoxy that delays hardening for at least a few minutes so you can brush it on is a viable candidate because when cured out, most epoxies have very similar performance. The differences are usually more about application and curing time than performance. Some mix up thinner than others, some have UV inhibitors, some take longer than others to harden to a non-sag state, etc, etc. Whichever you choose, measure it well and mix it thoroughly. Failure to do so causes almost 100% of epoxy failure to cure or yellowing problems. Oh, and never use a quick cure 5 min epoxy. They cure too fast to apply with a brush, won't level out to a smooth finish, and will yellow prematurely.

Who knows what junk is or where it came from? I would also look at your brush. If you clean it by dipping in solvent and brushing it dry on a paper towel or a cloth with loose fibers, that can also transfer lint into your finish (paper towels are particularly bad to do that).

The real name of Etex is Envirotex Lite. It's usually found in the foiling and decoupage section at Michaels. Comes in 2 ea 8 oz plastic bottles in a blue&white box. Etex works well but is thinner than Devcon Two Ton so requires multiple coats that are separately cured. Devcon is an epoxy glue and it is thicker than Etex, hardens faster and takes one coat. Devcon is more expensive. Some like one, some the other. IMO, when fully cured into coatings of equal thickness, Devcon and Etex work equally well.

A great brush is no guarantee of results, it just makes things easier. Brush choice is highly individual. I've used Paasche, Badger and Iwata brushes and prefer the Iwatas by a wide margin. If I were going to use one brush and it had to be under $100, it would be an Iwata Revolution BR. Its tip is large enough to shoot pearls and flakes but fine enough to do decent shading and details. Its price at around $70 is good and the quality that Iwata builds into all their brushes is there. JMHO

Several suppliers sell unpainted plastic and wood baits, among them Jannsnetcraft.com, Lure Parts Online (formerly Stamina), Predator (a TU board sponsor), and lurehardware.com. The plastic baits are easy to paint and require little preparation, the wood baits you have to build from a basic wood blank. JMHO, unpainted baits are all over the place in terms of performance quality. Although it may LOOK like a $20 Japanese bait, don't expect it to fish like one because they have different internal weighting systems, different quality control, etc. It may be better, it may be worse, you just have to try some to find baits that work well for you. When I started out, I often bought $2 factory baits from the Walmart sale bin of discontinued, package damaged, or unpopular colors because I knew how they would perform. I thought then, and still do, that if it won't swim right, what's the point in prettying it up with new paint?

I assume the duster cans are compressed CO2 but who knows? All they promise is an "air stream'. If woodworkers say it works with solvent finishes, it might work with DN as well. The problem is that using something else is an experiment that will take 3-4 months to yield any results pro or con. If it's con, it will be too late to save your DN. Let us know how it turns out!

I won't belabor airbrush choices because there are tons of info in this forum already - just use the search function at the top right of the page. "Primer" is a topic that comes up often and about which there is a lot of misunderstanding. First, what is PRIMER? Guys tend to throw the term around with abandon and that leads to a lot of misunderstanding and ruined paint jobs. I take it to mean a product that you apply to a lure to make subsequent paint layers adhere better. It is NOT a color basecoat, which is an all-over spray of acrylic paint used to hide underlying paint or wood grain. It is NOT a waterproof undercoating, per se. I've repainted more than a hundred plastic lures without using primer and no paint job has ever failed. I scuff up the bare plastic or the existing finish with 400 grit paper until the shine is gone to give the acrylic paint something to grip. And I heat set the paint before topcoating it. Topcoat dry paint with a good product and it will last just fine. The topcoat is critical. As long as the topcoat is intact, the paint will be fine. If the topcoat fails, nothing will keep paint on the lure. Things become more complicated if you're talking about raw wood baits. You must use a coating on bare wood before you shoot water based paint on it or the wood grain will rise and the surface will have an ugly rough texture. It's good practice choose a coating that is waterproof and durable for this - you kill 2 birds with one stone. You prevent wood grain from rising (waterproof) and you add lots of durability to the bait, which is going to lead a hard hard life. I guess you can call this "priming" but I call it undercoating because I don't like to use stuff that is sold as primer. Primer is not as durable as I want and it often contains solvents which stink (literally) and/or which react badly with one of my favorite topcoats - moisture cured polyurethane from Dick Nite. JMHO, the most fool proof wood undercoating is a "finish epoxy" (Etex, Devcon, Flexcoat, NuLustre - you name it) thinned a little with denatured alcohol so it penetrates the bare wood slightly. Once cured, epoxy is pretty much chemically inert. Any type of topcoat will coexist with it just fine. And it's handy to use if you have a finish epoxy on hand for topcoating lures. My other choice for undercoating is propionate (often known as "prop") dissolved in acetone and applied to the bare wood in multiple dips. I've never had a bad reaction (bubbling or wrinkled paint) with either product. There may be other undercoats/primers that work just fine with the paint and topcoat you choose. But you won't know for sure until you apply the topcoat. If the paint wrinkles and bubbles and ruins the lure, you used the wrong "primer" with the wrong topcoat.

Assuming you don't have a "bad batch" (rare), there are only 2 things that cause tacky epoxy finish. As mentioned, the first is poor measuring. The second and just as important is failure to mix the epoxy THOROUGHLY. The more molecules of the hardener and resin you can get next to each other, the better the epoxy will cure. I use Devcon Two Ton epoxy and mix the heck out of it with a piece cut from an old credit card for about a minute. When finished, it has lots of air bubbles but those disappear if you brush it on the lure with a fine bristled artist's brush. If you MUST, you can mix in a few drops of denatured alcohol after you mix it up to thin the epoxy and extend it's brush time a little. If you see a bubble after application, breath on it and it will usually pop. I don't heat the epoxy after application because as often as not, I screw up the finish doing that.

Are you talking about epoxy resin? If so,you can thin epoxy with denatured alcohol or lacquer thinner after it's mixed. It will cure just as hard.

Hey, if it's clear, hard, and waterproof, what's to complain? The other issue is how fast it will yellow and how badly. Time and UV exposure will tell. Epoxy isn't cheap so most of us brush it on to minimize the amount we waste. Thinning - after you mix the hardener and resin, adding a solvent like denatured alcohol or lacquer thinner to thin the mix is possible (in fact some epoxies already contain some solvent). It usually takes less solvent than you think - 3-4 drops in enough epoxy to paint 2 bass baits - to get a thickness you want. It will extend the "brush time" before the epoxy begins to harden but will not alter the "24 hrs until hard" guideline. It will make for a slightly weaker but still durable coating.

The undercoating is not just for waterproofing and durability, it also prevents the wood grain from rising when hit by water based acrylic paint. Absolutely necessary in the functional sense? No, but it sure looks better to end up with a nice smooth finish. If you heat set your acrylic paint, you will almost always get ugly bubbles where the air in the wood body expanded and forced itself out through the paint layer, if there is no durable undercoating. This happens in all wood I've used - including basswood. Building crankbaits taught me patience that I never had until late in life. If you are hand crafting them, you get the best baits if you build them with a progression of the best building practices. If you short change anything along the way, it always shows up in the end and you'll always know you could have and should have done better.

Most large hobby chains like Hobby Lobby carry Createx as their standard airbrush paint but you can also buy it and other brands online from coastairbrush.com, dixieart.com or taxidermy.net Sorry, can't help on the cedar

Look at a similar successful commercial bait and note how much it weighs from the description, or better yet, by actually weighing it on your own digital scales. Then weigh your shaped wood blank plus the hook hangers, lip, trebles and split rings. Add a guestimate of how much you will add in undercoat, paint, and topcoat (on 2 1/4" bass baits, that's usually about .03 oz). The total is the component weight of your crankbait, exclusive of the ballast. Subtract the total from the weight of the commercial bait and you have the amount of ballast to use if you were cloning the commercial bait. You may or may not use that ballast figure, but it gives you a good departure point from a design viewpoint.

Like the guys said, it starts with a straight slot. Ideally, cut the slot just thick enough so you can feel just a little drag as you slide in the lip. For me at some point, it gets down to eyeballing the lip to see if it's straight. Not so hard on flat sided baits with small lips. Just sight down the bait from the tail to see that an equal amount of lip shows on both sides of the bait. On deep divers with long lips, I scribe a center line around the bait just after cutting out the blank. Besides centering the hardware, I also helps align the lip. I use templates to cut lips and I put a tic at the center end of the big lips. Take a laser level and shoot it down the bait's center line (or the tail and belly hangers) and it should point right at the tic on the far end of the lip. When talking about squaring up the lip, it all goes back to how symmetrical you built the bait body. If your blade was squared when you cut out the blank, if you center lined the bait and marked the taper and rounding limit lines, and if you installed the hardware on the center line, the bait will be symmetrical and it will be much easier to square up the lip.

I saw a Larry Dahlberg Big Fish episode in which he dyed Alumite for a musky lure. Don't know what he used, but I doubt most dyes would affect the strength.

JMHO, installing the lip is the touchiest part of building a good bait. For me, it takes hemming and hawing, multiple sights down the belly of the bait and a little fidgeting before I get the lip dead perfect. I can't imagine trying to do that on a bait I just clearcoated with anything.

You can find PVC board at home centers sold as exterior trim board or you can buy fairly expensive PVC board under the brand Sintra online or at sign shops. The density of the trim board you get will vary according to the specific manufacturer because it's not designed for our application. A friend has used Sintra to build a deep diver and was happy with the result. It is much more dense than cedar or basswood. JMHO, it will definitely give you a different action than most wood baits since the weight will be diffused throughout the body instead of concentrated in the belly ballast like a "standard wood bait". Whether that's good or bad depends on who's throwing the crankbait I guess. For me, I prefer being able to distribute ballast without worrying that I'm approaching the sink/float threshold, and am not crazy about moving to another material for which I'll have to relearn how to finish the bait. But the consistency of the PVC board is otherwise attractive. Player's choice!