BobP

I use a scroll saw to cut blanks. Pretty slow work on hardwood but it’s fine on balsa. After all, I’m in no hurry. A standard 12 Tpi scroll blade has the perfect kerf for a 1/32” circuit board lip and it’s easy to double cut the slot for 1/16” polycarbonate. But the Dremel does OK on pre-formed balsa blanks and if there’s a goof, I can use epoxy putty to mount the lip. Putty also works great if you have to replace an existing broken lip or if you want to change the lip angle. Just pack it in, smooth it out and cut a new lip slot in a few minutes. No, it’s not as clean and neat as a table saw with a proper custom jig. IF you have a saw and build enough baits of a single design to warrant the trouble of making the jig, that’s a no-brained.

Yeah, it’s almost unavoidable that you call a “TRD” turd instead of what ZMan intended to be an abbreviation for “The Real Deal”. They shoulda known.... and maybe they did.

The Ned rig is a simple bait consisting of a light jig head with a small cigar shaped plastic bait threaded on it. Not the originator, but ZMan has lately popularized it with a small wire barbed mushroom jig head and their Elaztech super stretchy finesse TRD baits. The Elaztech floats and makes the rig stand up on the bottom. This makes a very durable combo. I’m a power fisherman who usually prefers large baits: crankbaits, jigs, Texas rigged plastics, etc. But a recent trip to fish in Canada made me a Ned rig believer. Bites on the power baits were few and far between. I tried the Ned rig in desperation and couldn’t put it down for the rest of the week. Fish after fish. Smallies, largemouths, large fish and small fish. It didn’t matter. Everything bit it. Tie one on on the morning and use that one bait all day to catch 25-40 bass. A few weeks later we fished for stripers in Virginia. I brought a Ned rig just to see what would happen. The stripers weren’t interested but we caught several nice largemouths to 5 lbs on it. Now I’m a believer. Setup: ML spinning rod, 10 lb braid, 6 or 8 lb leader. Presentation: let it sink to the bottom and just dead stick it on a semi-slack line.

I use a thick flat rubber band stretched over the head of the bait. I stretch and position it so it looks symmetrical then mark the slot with a Sharpie and cut it with a thin fiber reinforced Dremel cutoff disk. A jig and table saw would be better but I use different lip angles and don’t have a table saw. The rubber band comes with grocery store celery stalks. Lip slots are the bane of pre-formed balsa blanks but it’s hard to form very small balsa baits from blocks of balsa if you do everything by hand.

I typically do what Skeeter suggests, using a scale and subtraction of component weights to get the ballast needed to hit a target weight. That works well when copying a commercial wood lipped crankbait, most of which use single unit belly ballast/hangers. But if you are building a lipless bait from a plastic rattle bait original, the method is pretty useless because weight shifting castability and sound are lost, and the same goes for any bait that uses shifting weight to promote long casts and noise. Some plastic baits just don’t copy well in wood.

Assuming it is an epoxy, I seal with epoxy most of the time and then scuff it after curing to promote paint adhesion. Works fine.

Poplar seems popular for musky guys. Were I doing it, I’d probably try paulownia since it’s both hard and light at 18 lbs/cu ft. But it can be hard to find. If you want “near neutral” buoyancy, that opens it up to using a mold and something like Alumite, or consider PVC trim board, which is not water absorbent. They can chew on it but can’t make it sink. Lots of choices.

Most hobby builders use non toxic water based airbrush paint. There are many brands. Createx is a standard but you can mix/match among art and taxidermy brands. The alternative is lacquer based paint. Each has advantages/disadvantages. As far as epoxy for clearcoating, there are two main camps. Slow cure glue epoxies like Devcon Two Ton and decoupage/table top epoxies like Envirotex Lite (aka ETEX). Again, each has its advantages. There are numerous posts here about the popular epoxies, how to apply them, their different characteristics, etc. use the search feature to explore choices and techniques. There are other clearcoats too: spray on urethane, moisture cured urethane, UV cured polyesters. Again, use SEARCH.

If you can’t find the part listed in the Iwata site, It’s doubtful that one of their authorized dealers stocks it. I’d give Iwata a call and see if they can fix you up.

Paint thinners and paints including Createx can contain chemicals like glycerin or other flow enhancers that leave a slightly tacky feel after all the water has evaporated. If you dry your paint with a hair dryer or just let the paint air dry for a short while, you shouldn’t have a problem unless you are applying paint in thick layers. Even then, if you dry each color with a hair dryer as you shoot it, you will probably be ok.

I never had much luck with folding stencils. I use non stick stencils that you can simply flip over to do both sides. Dry them first, of course, and you can save them for future baits too.

X3 on the Dremel tool. Get either a Dremel chuck or a set of different diameter collets, a set of micro drill bits, and some extra fine grit sanding cylinders. A sander is great for sizing the thickness of wood blanks and tapering them.

I got a whiff of what making baits for sale was like years ago when I gave a BASS pro some baits as a gratuity for a guide trip. A few months later, he asked me to build a dozen for him. Looking into the commercial abyss, I decided customers and delivery schedules were not what I wanted, so built and traded the new baits to him for some custom commercial baits he had shown me.

Cleanup is fast and easy with water, soap, or a solvent. They can be thinned with water or a paint reducer like Createx 4011, or you can make your own with water, alcohol and a little glycerin. Thinning depends on how you like to paint, whether you plan to do freehand details, and at what pressure. Some do, some don’t. Some prefer using paint templates and shooting unthinned. Some brands of paint, especially taxidermy colors, comes pre-thinned. It all really depends on your style of painting and whether you need to thin a specific paint to get it to shoot the way you need it to.

Createx and it’s sub-brands are popular because they’re widely available and consistent in quality, but there are other brands which offer specialized palettes for wildlife art including fish. I mix brands and often find paints among the taxidermy paint brands that let me shoot without a lot of blending, thinning, and layering of colors. The colors you choose are personal preference. Everyone needs white, black, red, green and blue. After that it’s up to you. Mix intermediate colors or buy shades,, pearls and flakes you can use without mixing. Among the Createx paints, I most often pick the “transparent” colors that allow you to layer paint for more natural looking fish coloration.

I wouldn’t count on any surface finish product to correct an underlying fragile plastic bait problem. Were it me, I’d contact someone like Predator Bass Baits who has successfully ordered good quality custom plastic baits from Asia and discuss the ins and outs of getting what you want.

Yeah, I think one thing that happens is a small scale seller doesn’t get back to the buyer in what many of us would consider a timely manner. But remember who you're buying from. It’s often one guy with no retail experience working off of his kitchen table. There are many reasons he may not be able to whip a response back to you quickly. Job travel, family sickness, computer problem, etc etc. But I don’t find it good form for a seller to ask for photos to substantiate a problem before making good on a product complaint. An unhappy buyer is an unhappy buyer and needs to be remedied regardless.

Well, I don’t think hand shaped lures can ever be perfectly consistent. But you can get close using a router table and safety templates to radius the edges. There’s a tutorial about that here on the site. I prefer using hand tools and a Dremel sander after marking all the round over and taper limits with a compass and removing most of the material with a good woodcarving knife. Some guys prefer rounding over with sandpaper glued into pieces of pvc pipe of the appropriate diameter. If you use hand tools to shape lures you have to develop a sharp eye to keep them symmetrical and consistent. That just comes with experience. But I think the key is to become very standardized and consistent with whatever method you choose. My last choice would be hand sanding with pieces of sandpaper. That has been the slowest and least consistent method for me.

I use a wire to fill the lip slot completely with epoxy paste then push in the clean lip. The excess epoxy pushes out the back of the slot where it’s easy to wipe off. If I butter the lip before insertion it tends to get scraped off the lip at the front of the slot and onto the exposed lip, which is harder to clean. I’ve also read that there is a minimum film thickness for epoxy to form its best bond, so you don’t want the slot too tight. Using paste epoxy, it really doesn’t matter how loosely the lip fits the slot because the paste doesn’t run like a liquid will. The paste I use cures VERY slowly. It takes about 5 hours to begin forming a significant bond and 12 hrs before you should handle the bait again. But I like the stuff. Experience teaches patience. Wait for glue and finish to dry/cure or screw it up. Once screwed, it’s hard to recoup a mistake.

I use slow cure epoxy on Lexan lips and hangers, ballast, etc. By name, U40 Rod Bond paste epoxy. Any slow cure epoxy will do but I like paste because it stays where you put it and cures slowly so I have plenty of time to fine tune the lip’s position. A batch of epoxy will have enough work time (about an hour) to do a large batch of baits. The only place I use quick cure epoxy is to glue the halves of balsa baits together that are split for thru wiring. You don’t want it anywhere it will show on the outside of a bait because it turns a dirty brown color, and it’s only water resistant, not waterproof. Not many glues like to bond well to Lexan. I sand the Lexan to give it some tooth and cut 2 slots in the rear of the lip to form a more secure “key” for the epoxy.

Ron, I meant nothing critical to your post. I was just commenting on the advisability of a “Call Out forum” on lure sellers.

I think this is a can of worms. Yes there are sellers that don’t pay enough attention to the quality of the blanks they sell, or take a defensive attitude when a complaint comes in, or who just won’t respond to a complaint. There are buyers who paid money in good faith for blanks they can’t use because of defects. Undoubtedly, most of the posts I’ve seen concerning this problem are valid complaints. But I don’t discount the possibility that a buyer can be unrealistic about what he is buying or too quick to publicly criticize a seller without contacting him to discuss the problem and ask for redress in a polite and businesslike manner. What’s fair? Does TU and its members really want to get in the business of arbitrating disputes when we only know one side of the issue? I’ve been burned a couple of times buying blanks. It made me wary of knockoff blanks from Asian sources, so I try to vet sellers as best I can and then seek opinions on specific lure models before I order. This can be a shady corner of the marketplace, so you pays your money and takes your chances, IMO.

I don’t know how BentonB does his, but as a hobby builder I keep a library of body and lip templates and a notebook recording measurements, weights of components, wood type and coating details on each new crankbait design I do. That lets me reproduce a successful crankbait and gives me a base line of detail from which to experiment to improve a design. If I want to cook up a batch I made 5 years ago, I just refer to my recipe instead of my faulty memory (which NEVER works).