BobP

Some guys, including some pros, like red trebles on the front hanger. Some say it gets bit better, some say it's just a confidence thing. JMHO, If you want red, why not just use red paint on the lure? My favorites are Gamakatsu Round Bend. Yes, expensive but also the best. Super sharp out of the box, stay sharp and have a nice gray-bronze low profile finish. IMO, next best is the VMC 7541, similar but black color. You usually get what you pay for in trebles. At $.80 a pair, Gamys are expensive but they're on all the cranks in my fishing box. Size? 55% #4's, 40% #6's and 5% #2's.

Excellent pics! Thanks jake.

I think a balsa topwater will definitely need ballast. Where and the amount depends on the size of the bait, what kind of balsa and trebles you use, and how much of the tail you want submerged. All that boils down to experimenting to get it right. JMHO, I'd first try ballasting toward the tail, about 2/3 of the way back from the nose. On a thru-wire popper, after you waterproof the bait and it's ready for finishing, attach the trebles and drive a sewing pin into the belly where you want to test ballast. Wrap lead solder around the pin until you get the float attitude you want, then drill the ballast hole and epoxy in the solder. You're looking for a position and an amount of ballast that will sink the tail to where you want it while still having the front lip submerged for spitting. All other things equal (are they ever?) The more toward the tail the ballast is, the less ballast you will need and the better the popper will cast. The finish and clearcoat will add only about .03 oz, so you can more or less ignore that weight.

Scoop10, I'm in the same boat as you with Famowood Duratuff water cured poly. Push the cured skin aside and dip some out, it will still work fine. Don't remove the skin from the container because a new skin just as thick will form pretty quickly if you do. I also thin mine with acetone as needed and it turns out as well as when the can was new.

I most often use 5/32" (about 4mm) molded 3D eyes on bass baits. Sometimes I go larger but seldom smaller. If you don't want to maintain a selection, I'd paint the eyes on. From what I can tell, the bass won't care and it looks fine if you do it carefully.

Etching primer vs sanding. I can see why LC would use etching primer. I doubt the LC factory wants to hire 100 "sanding guys" to sit and prep their blanks for paint. It would be absolutely archaic But most of us mud hut refinishers have to sand the blanks anyway to remove original finish so what the heck. I haven't had any problems with peeling or lifting after sanding with 400 grit and then going straight to acrylic.

A coating of Devcon on a medium large crankbait adds about .03 oz to the weight, not very much. I use the Storm Suspend Strips/Dots on jerkbaits to suspend them in different temp water. The lead tape is nice since it allows to experiment with weight placement. If you choose to drill and put in more ballast, I recommend epoxying a piece of lead into the hole and refinishing. That's stronger than just dripping molten lead into a hole in balsa. In any event, don't ever slap a soft balsa lure on water to clear weeds, or the ballast will shoot out the bottom of the lure!

I use a smooth round jar cap, mix with a round plastic swizzle stick and try to do it at room temperature or higher. Don't fold air into the epoxy. If you have lots of bubbles or it's too thick (they usually go together), stir in a few drops of denatured alcohol or acetone. Don't overwork the surface while brushing - that introduces more bubbles - brush it in one direction and make sure every part of the lure is "wetted out" or you can get "fisheyes" or circular voids in the finish. For me, the best results are usually in summer when the epoxy (Devcon) is 80-85 deg.

JMHO, if you're not doing it for commercial gain, copy anything you want. You can usually produce a better bait (straighter and more durable) as a custom builder than the original mass produced factory bait.

The heaviest-duty skirt I've used is the Hydrosilk brand. They come in a limited number of colors but the round extruded silicone is about as tough as it gets, and it makes a very full skirt. I get mine at www.jannsnetcraft.com

I guess you could make a custom jig to hold them straight while cutting the lip slot but that seems a lot of trouble to me. What I did was cut the slots as straight as I could, but thicker than usual. When I installed the lips, I did it with Rod Bond paste epoxy and the larger slot gave me some extra room to visually true up the lip. Not an elegant solution but it works.

If you're talking about the flat sided plastic bait with circuit board lip, I bought one finished and the bill was crooked. Snapped right out with light finger force, which was good in this case, but not an example of durability. I'd put a dab of 5 min epoxy in the slot before assembling. Mine was not "pegged", whatever that means in this case.

Danny, most commercial wood baits are made with integrated ballast weight/belly hangers and you can make your own or buy them ready made from lurehardware.com or other suppliers. Alternatively, it works just as well to drill holes in front of and/or behind a plain wire belly hanger, insert lead and patch the holes with wood filler. Just a "guestimate" is that a 2 7/8" balsa lure "wants to be" about 1/2 oz total weight, without treble hooks. That suggests a ballast of around 1/4 oz. If you go with separate ballast, you can experiment by adding more via another hole or drilling out some ballast to get it perfected.

Most of my crank bodies are 2 - 2 1/2" long and are not turned on a lathe. Type of wood depends on the action and bouyancy you're looking for. For hardwood cranks, my favorite is basswood. It has almost no grain effect, is consistent in density and sands smooth as butter. It sands at a moderate rate that makes it easy to maintain discipline while shaping. For shallow baits where more bouyancy is important, balsa is king. But it takes care not to overwork it while shaping/sanding and unless you use a hard grade of balsa, you need to use through-wire construction, epoxy undercoating, etc to reinforce the bait and make it durable. If you're talking about minnow baits/jerk baits, the most popular bass size is probably 4.5 - 5 inches. JMHO, the best ones are a balancing act: length/diameter/ballast. One of the most successful bass minnows is the Smithwick Suspending Pro Rogue, at 4.5", with an oval cross section and weighing around .42 oz with 3 ea #6 trebles.

Pearl all over, Gray shoulders and back, then splatter black over the sides with a toothbrush. Fast and simple.

Base coat sealer? What's that, and why would you need it on plastic? I sand, shoot a color base of white acrylic, the colors and then clearcoat. Peeling can sometimes be caused by not drying the base and color coats enough before clearcoating. I flash dry with a hair dryer.

I think both rotate all points on the lure's surface through 360 degrees to obtain the same result: the clearcoat stays where you put it. To me, going vertical or horizontal is a question of ease of attachment to the fixture. As long as your rpm is moderately slow (mine is 4 rpm) centrifugal force will not have significant effect.

I wouldn't do it unless you feel the factory clearcoat is totally inadequate, especially on the smaller walleye lures. I tinker with baits alot but have one rule: if a crankbait catches fish like crazy, don't change a thing. Small changes can have big effects on performance. On those special baits, only correct problems that may lead to bait failure, like a cracked clearcoat on a wood lure. On baits that won't catch - tinker until they do or discard them. If you're dealing with factory baits, there will be plenty of the latter type to play around with - unfortunately.

Dan, circuit board is fiberglass cloth or other substrate material, plus resin, cured under high pressure and temperature. You can try but unless you have a way of applying pressure/heat, the end result will not be as uniform or as strong as circuit board. At about $4-6, you can make lots of lips out of a one square foot piece of circuit board, and polycarbonate (aka Lexan) is similarly priced. Me, I'd save the glass cloth and resin for when I punched a hole in my hull while fishing crankbaits in a stump field

A turner is nice to have. I think mine cost about $8 total and uses a 4 rpm AC timing motor that's available on Ebay. Do a search on lure turners for previously posted info. As an alternative: if you are using straight Devcon 2 Ton (not thin runny clearcoats) you can make up a couple of hooks and attach them to the nose and tail of the bait. Switch the bait nose/tail every 2-3 mins for the first 15 min and then every 5 min or so for the next 15 mins, then hang it by it's nose. Leave the unused Devcon in it's container and touch it at the end of 30 mins. It's an indicator of whether the epoxy is cured enough to stop turning. Slightly more labor intensive, but it works fine.

I haven't tried Solo cups but am using Swede's prop pellets (of whatever propionate type) disolved in acetone. It works fine as a waterproofer on raw wood and 6-7 fairly thin dip coats are strong enough to reinforce balsa. It dries in a few minutes so 6-7 dips take about an hour, then the lure is ready for further work. Faster than poly or epoxy. It is not crystal clear, nor can I speak for it's scratch resistance, so I use other stuff for clearcoating.

I tried some of their roto molded fat balsa bodies because I can't hand carve round shapes accurately and it's hard to cut a straight lip slot in bodies that are already shaped. The ones I got (1 5/8") are TINY and from soft balsa that's fairly rough. They require considerable sanding and a few had lip slots that were out of true. Jann's sells balsa baits that are undercoated (a plus) but these are not. So bottom line, there were plusses and minuses. JMHO, if you want flat cranks, it's easy to work from raw materials and you'll have more build options (like lip angle). If you try the Lurecraft balsa bodies, I'd plan on installing a thru-wire frame and epoxy undercoating to reinforce the soft balsa wood.

I guess I'm with Scoop10. I record how I make lures and what materials I use, then fish them for a few seasons and take a look at how they held up. It's more fun fishing them than sitting in my garage whacking crankbaits with a hammer. I understand the engineering bent for testing and quantitative analysis but for me, crankbait building is more a craft thinggy. Different strokes.