BobP

Diemai, my gravity feed airbrush is easy to clean. Shoot plain water or glass cleaner into the airbrush cup, press the trigger and repeat once or twice until the brush is clean. I use a spray bottle of water in my garage and catch the spray/drips in a trash can. It takes maybe 20-30 seconds. I do a more extensive cleaning after the session by partially disassembling the brush and cleaning the parts - but that takes only a few minutes. So it's not troublesome and you get the advantages of better paint control, non-toxic process, a wide palette of acrylic paints, and less cost over time. A 2 oz bottle of acrylic paint lasts months for hobby painting since you're often using only 5-6 drops of paint in the airbrush on each shot. Try it, you'll like it!

You can get a cheap Badger airbrush kit containing a can of Propel compressed air for around $25. Hobby acrylic paints like Apple Barrel, etc, are about $2 per 2 oz bottle. Look for a 40 or 50% off coupon from Michael's or Hobby Lobby for the airbrush. The alternative is aerosol paint cans (rattle cans) which usually contain solvents and have a single wide spray pattern. The airbrush is a better tool. $2 for a double syringe of Devcon Two Ton epoxy at Walmart to coat the paint, a small paint brush, and you're an "artiste". That's about the cheapest you can go unless you huff paint like Rookie:drool:.

I've done it 2 ways. the easiest is buy an epoxy putty stick and use that to plug the hole. It should be OK if the hole is about the size of a BB. Paint it with something waterproof just to be sure it can't leak. A more labor intensive way: cut a disk from an aluminum soda can (regular scissors work fine) a bit larger than the hole, bend it to match the surface and then superglue it on the bait. Sand and refinish the area after it has dried so the repair is invisible.

It depends on how hard your balsa is. Unless you specifically order hard balsa, the wood you get from most sources requires thru-wire construction, IMO. Install a screw eye into the end grain of a piece of your stuff and see how hard it is to pull out. That will give you an idea of how it's gonna last.

I'm a "keep it square and it'll be good" kind of guy and suspect many baitmakers are the same - obsessing over whether that lip might be a degree out of true. But I'll try anything that MIGHT improve a bait. I see (and own) well known custom wood baits that have lips slightly off kilter and wondered if it was poor quality control or maybe a 'special something' that Guru X was intentionally doing. After the discussion here and having tested baits that are identical except for a small lip offset, I'm leaning toward "poor quality control - but sometimes it may not matter". There are many ways to screw up a bait! I don't need to add another! But it does suggest that there is some "forgiveness" in bait design since some of the baits with cockeyed lips work great and catch fish for me. Oh well, nobody said you have to know EVERYTHING about building crankbaits - you just have to be willing to learn and get better.

G10 is lighter and less flexible than polycarbonate but it's easy to cut and drill with standard hand tools and it shapes easily with a Dremel sanding cylinder. I've never had it split or fracture but it will abrade away over time when used on crankbait lip. I've never used it as a segment on a swimbait.

I use Devcon 2T mixed 60/40 with denatured alcohol or propionate disolved in acentone for undercoating. Never a problem with either, clearcoating with D2T or Dick Nite poly. I have to believe it's your undercoat that is causing the problem, but I've never used it.

I think the hooks are #6 and the split rings #1. If you have a bunch of rusted baits, #6 and #4 trebles and #1 and #2 split rings will take care of 90% of your needs. A pair of split ring pliers wouldn't hurt either!

Central NC includes Lexington and Thomasville, furniture making centers where many factories have gone bust in the last 15 years. It would not surprise me if the duplicating lathe had been used for making furniture legs once upon a time.

He's the maker of "On the Line" crankbaits in Kernersville, NC. Here's a link to his website. Tri-City Bait and Tackle

Here ya go: Model Rocket Kits, Parts & Supplies These guys are into hobby rocketry not lure lips but the translucent white is what I've gotten from them. Best ask about the color to make sure they haven't changed over to some ugly green or yellow color on their G10 circuit board. They sell G10 (aka Garolite, aka Micarta, etc) in 9"x12" sheets, in several thicknesses. Good service, OK price.

I think guys have been building great wooden lures for toothy critters like muskies, pike and bluefish for a hundred years. Build it from the right wood and use durable finishes and you'll be fine. A few guys here on TU build saltwater baits and there are saltwater fishing sites that concentrate on them.

Gator, I do my own Lexan and circuit board lips using a pair of Wiss straight cut metal shears ($12 from Home Depot) and a Dremel tool mounted with a fine grit 1/2" dia sanding drum. Rolling your own is the cheapest way to go in the long run, plus you can design lips to suit the specific baits you build. I've never been very happy with store-bought plastic lips. A 1x1" sheet of polycarbonate or G10 circuit board is less than $5 from Mcmaster-Carr. One sheet makes lots of lips.

I like Dick Nite Fishermun's Lurecoat, a moisture cured polyurethane, for coating jig and spinnerbait heads. It was designed to coat metal spoons. Dip them in and hang to dry, dry to touch in an hour, then the moisture cure process begins and makes the coating tougher over about a week. Very thin coating, very clear and non-yellowing. Click on the Dick Nite banner ad here on the site for a discount price, or even a small quantity to try out for the price of shipping. You should search for Dick Nite threads to see its storage and handling requirements. I've also used Devcon 2 Ton Epoxy to coat jig heads and it works well but is much thicker. Get it in a double syringe at Walmart for $2, thoroughly mix it and paint it on with a small brush. Both of them are fairly impact resistant but can be chipped if thrown directly against a rock.

A hunting wakebait? JMHO, swimbaits and wakebaits have too little lip area to hunt. Besides, I think the main attractor for them is their larger size plus a slow steady sinuous swim pattern. To me, "hunting" is a diving bait that operates on the edge of the acceptable performance envelope. More action and it will run out of control and spin out. Less, and it's just a straight runner. It has to diverge from its base course to both sides, at unpredictable intervals, and it always has to correct back to its base course. I can build baits that do that but the "reject" percentage in a large group of such baits is higher than with normal baits - so it's not something I strive for. On "normal" baits, a snap during the retrieve or hitting cover gives you the same effect - your crankbait changes direction and that gets attention from predators.

I don't see how you can decide how much and where to do it without float testing the lure with trial ballast weight so that you get the float attitude you want. Different strokes for different folks, plus the shape and weight of your bait is probably different from all other baits. I personally like a walking bait to sit tail down at 45 degrees in the water. Some like more, some less. My 5 incher has the ballast forward of the tail about 1.5 inches. I also like the line tie underneath the chin.

OK, Mark - now Don't Tell Anybody, but here's the only place I know of to buy paulownia on the internet, dried and cut to your specs: Custom Millwork, Historical Reproductions, Natural Edge Slabs, Kiln Dried Hardwoods, 3",4", 5" Wide Flooring, Basswood for Carvers from Full Cycle Woodworks. I googled paulownia until I went blind, then a friend found this source and was kind enough to order me some. OK, "kind enough" because I build him baits for free I like paulownia. It has a nominal density of 16 lbs/cu ft versus 26 for yellow poplar and 23 for basswood. It's hard enough to use screw eyes versus thru-wiring, which I consider a BIG advantage over softer balsa. Machine cutting/sanding goes fine. You need care when hand sanding because paulownia has some black grain structure that is more porous and softer than the surrounding wood, which can be hard to keep level by hand when sanding an edge. But otherwise, it's great stuff and one of my favorites.

Balsa is one of the most buoyant woods and it gives you a crankbait with very lively wiggle and fast float, which is optimum for shallow crankbaits since you can bump cover and the bait will quickly float up so you can continue the retrieve. It can be used on any type bait with enough ballast (even deep divers). You can use heavier woods like pine, cedar, basswood, etc and they require less ballast to float - and they all have different performance, so it's up to the baitmaker to choose wood to suit how he wants his baits to perform. Of the woods typically available in local stores in most areas, white cedar and basswood are probably the most used for crankbaits.

Denatured alcohol is ethanol with methyl hydrate added to "denature" it (i.e., make it undrinkable). Denatured alcohol is also called methylated spirits.

Mark, I didn't mean what you took me to mean - I don't think! OK, take a deep diving bait that has a lip with an almost zero down angle referenced from the axis of the bait's body. Hold the bait in swimming position with the lip facing you. The lip will be exactly horizontal, right? Now, instead of installing the lip on the horizontal, give it a few degrees up on one side and down the same number of degrees on the other side. It's slightly canted. That's what I meant. I think you may be talking about what I call "lip down angle", or the difference in degrees from horizontal the lip is mounted when you look at the bait from the side. On a typical crankbait (not a swimbait) there are 2 components to the bait's EFFECTIVE down angle. The first is the lip down angle, as above. The second is where the bait is ballasted and how that affects the swimming attitude of the bait during the retrieve. If the ballast is biased toward the front of the bait, it increases the effective down angle because the lip will be swimming at a greater down angle along with the whole bait. If the ballast is at the balance point on the bait's longitudinal axis (lip and hooks installed) it will not add to the lip down angle and the bait will swim in a horizontal posture with an X-ing action around the ballast point. I haven't built enough wakebaits to draw a lot of conclusions. On a copy I made of a 5" Strike King King Shad (from basswood, not a light wood), I copied the original lip. it wraps around the head of the bait like a fan and is only 7/16" long. And it's mounted at a lip down angle of about 80 degrees. The bait swims nicely in horizontal attitude - even though it has a very short lip with not much area driving a 1 1/4 oz body. Using that configuration as rough guide, I've built other wakebaits in paulownia up to 7" and have always used the lip angle of 80 degrees but with a simple square lip shorter than 1". They also swim fine. I conclude that it doesn't take much lip length to swim a wakebait. I think using shallower lip angles may cause a wakebait to dive. I don't know about angles of 80+ degrees since I haven't tried them (and don't plan to!). Btw, I have always ballasted in the front segment just behind the hook hanger and in the next segment at the extreme front. I feel ballasting a tail cuts down on the action of the bait considerably.

I use a pair of round nose wire bending pliers and choose a wire type and diameter that doesn't require brute strength to work - most often .040 dia SOFT temper stainless steel wire. It holds up just fine on bass baits, don't know about musky baits. If you are doing lots of baits of the same design, you can lay out a bending pattern on a piece of scrap wood and drive in nails at the bend points as a template. There are multiple ways to thru-wire. For balsa bass baits, I split the bait in half, make depressions with an awl where the wire travels and a hollow for the ballast, then lay in the wire and ballast and glue the halves together with 5 min epoxy. If you use that method, don't forget you need a centerline all around the bait to guide your cut - and that needs to be done immediately after you cut out the lure blank, while it's still "square" and can be marked with a compass.

Vodkaman, thanks, your comments on placing the lip lower/higher on the bait are very useful, but perhaps I was not clear in describing my question. I'm referring to cutting a lip slot that is not perfectly square and perpendicular to the side of the bait; in other words, canting the blade of the saw a few degrees to the left or right while cutting the lip slot. The lip is still mounted straight in line with the body but is rotated a few degrees from horizontal on the finished bait.

I recently built a set of medium deep divers with coffin shaped lips set at an almost straight (i.e. zero) down angle. They ran fine with tight action, but not exactly what I had hoped for in terms of a snappy action. Looking at a very similar "store bought" custom crank that's one of my favorites, I noticed its lip is slightly angled to one side instead of being perfectly horizontal. Frankly, I had assumed that the offset lip angle was probably unintentional on the part of the builder. But what the heck, I decided to build a second set of baits with the lip slots angled a few (3-4) degrees from horizontal. I haven't done intensive testing against the first (straight) baits, but an initial "get'em wet" at the lake seems to show a slightly more "snappy", wider action, maybe a bit of roll included. Maybe I'm just imagining things:drool:. They were no harder to tune to run straight. My question is this: do you mount lips with intentional offsets from horizontal? If so, what what is the outcome you're looking for regarding bait action, and how big an offset angle have you tried? Thanks!

I use Createx opaque red and Delta Ceramcoat yellow, a thick acrylic paint designed for ceramics. Instead of stamping, I think of transferring a drop of paint to the lure, then take off any extra paint that I think may run. When you hang the bait to dry, the paint can sometimes thin out at the front of the eye. That's one reason to put the iris at the front - where the paint dried thinnest.

DT, I generally agree but I often can't "scuff up" a badly chalked up, nicked up rescue plastic bait to look right and get new finish to stick to it. I'm not crazy about removing finish, I just want to be sure to get down to a solid surface and I want that surface to be able to adhere to finish. Wood is different - IMO, anyone who sands a balsa bait down to bare wood needs a head exam! I rarely rescue balsa baits whose hooks have rusted off on a snag. I assume 99.9% of them absorbed water and exploded. Even if they still float, it's usually a waste of time because they're at least partially waterlogged.