BobP

On balsa thru wire baits (the only ones I thru wire) I split the bait with a razor blade and lay in a wire frame for the hangers and the line tie. Trace around the wires with a fine pen and then use a nail set to recess the wires so the halves fit back together neatly. Glue the halves back together with 5 min epoxy and it will be stronger than ever, with an epoxy backbone. I like a brass wire line tie but prefer stainless hook hangers, so usually just run the line tie about 1 1/2 inch into the crank. Although not connected to the hangers, it is very secure when epoxied.

I fill the ballast hole about 1/2 full, stick in the weight/hanger and wipe off the excess. Take a small artist's brush and build up the epoxy until there's a uniform dome of epxoy over the hole. Looks good and avoids the extra steps of wood filler and sanding. Usually not as perfect as using wood filler but it looks OK, especially if you use a domed ballast weight. I hate sanding around a hook hanger!

I just started with the BPS finesse weights on some 2" basswood baits and needed to cut them in pieces to get a small enough ballast (.07 oz). I drill (well, burn actually) a hole for them with a 1/4" cylindrical sharpening stone. It goes surprisingly fast. Just do it outside where the smoke isn't a problem! I drill a pilot hole with a 1/8 Dremel brad point drill bit before hitting it with the stone. The is the most reliable way I've found to get a uniform ballast hole - without a drill press, the right bit, and a jig fixture. If anyone else has a trick way to drill ballast holes without a drill press, I'm all ears. :grin:

You can float test without the clearcoat. Dry acrylic latex is waterproof, just not very durable. I do it with the hangers and bill installed so water won't get in those holes. I temporarily install trebles in the hangers and hang solder on the front treble, adjusting the amount until I get the right weight. Rember the clearcoat will also add weight; I guestimate it at .01 oz per inch of bait for Devcon. If you're building a floater, that's academic. Pat it dry with a paper towel and hang it for an hour to thoroughly dry.

I tried your method with a drill bit clamped in a vise as the post and used visegrips to twist .029 ss leader wire. It's quick and yields uniform hangers that fit in a small 1/16" drilled hole. The hand twisted ss hangers do have more glue surface but I'm sure these glue up stronger than commercial screw eyes - and look better too. You can always count on good ideas from TU!

Hey, Talley, I weigh everything because I build alot of suspending or slow floating cranks. I tried casting lead weights with an integrated hanger in a wood mold but was not satisfied with the results. The finesse weights work well and you aren't slinging molten lead around either. I was pretty sure I reinvented the wheel here, as you confirmed. I'll still probably ballast with solder in front of the belly hanger on many cranks because it gives you a head down attitude when paused, and it makes it dive quickly. But the finesse weights are a neat method.

I think most plastic cranks are ultrasonically welded. I doubt there's any neat way to get them apart other than cutting or drilling them. On many products, the weld or glue seams are usually stronger than the underlying material.

I'm trying cylindrical lead finesse weights as belly ballast/hanger on some small bass cranks and so far, it looks good. Normally, I drill a cavity in the bait's chest, fill it with solder, then install a stainless wire hanger behind it. The .20 finesse weights are about 1/4" in diameter and can be cut with a sharp knife by rolling them across a table. I halved them to make .10 oz weight/hangers. .29" stainless wire through the line hole works fine as a hanger. Drilling just one hole and filiing it with epoxy to body level sure makes for an easier/faster/neater installation of this hardware. If I could cast and mold lead better, I'd make custom belly weights but this gets me by OK.

I'm no expert but have used several. All I've seen spray a circular pattern. Internal mix brushes have a variety of tips to change the brush's spray aperture, plus a 2 function trigger. Push down for more air, pull back for more paint. The 4th variable is the color medium and how it's thinned. Using a brush gets natural with a little practice and the more you use one, the more control you will gain. You can mask areas to avoid overspray but in my experience, it's difficult and usually looks lousy. The advantage of airbrushing is shading colors into each other to render a more lifelike effect.

Yours is a fast and reliable way to get it done. By whatever method, I think the homemade jobs are superior to store bought SS screw eyes, which are usually tapered and have very shallow threads. That doesn't provide much bonding surface. The homemades hold better, IMO.

you have the right length rattles. I've only tried rattles in shallow running wide bodied balsa cranks. You have to be careful NOT to put them at the axis of rotation on the crankbait or they won't rattle. On my first attempts, I placed it high in the bait to avoid the wire harness and belly weight. The weight of the ball bearing in the rattle caused the crank to list to one side when it was a rest on the water (not desirable!). I gave up after that, thinking Hey, if you want rattles, buy plastic baits

I split my baits when using through wire construction so I can put in the line tie and both hangers as a single wire unit. Glue up the halves with 5 min epoxy. With hand tools, or even with a drill press, I can't conceive I'd be accurate enough to hit the nose from the tail, or vice versa. However, to answer your question, I'd use a bit that's only slightly larger diameter than your wire. You aren't going to get 100% glue coverage in a long hole unless you have a way to pump epoxy from one end to the other. I don't know a practical way to do that. IMO, the smaller the better.

I average building 10-12 cranks a month, so don't need to "get industrial with it". If I did, I wouldn't be hand twisting! It does tone the hand musculature I just like the small profile and esthetic of a thin SS hanger. Really, .29 SS wire is not hard to work by hand. Just make sure it's long enough that you aren't trying to twist anything less than a 1" long piece. That's a sure way to get punctured! After fishing a lot of commercial wood baits, I wanted some that would not crap out on me unless I and some bass really abused them. So I tend to overbuild and hangers with lots of glue surface are part of that. When I get a few cranks that are "perfect", I want them to stick around for awhile!

My favorite color for clear water is something I call "Eggman", which is a bone color pattern. I use acrylic latex. Belly is pearl white. Shoot a stripe of standard yellow on the sides, then shoot back and sides with a scale pattern of light tan (my bottle says it's "Goosefeather"). The yellow showing through the tan gives the back a bone tone. I usually leave a very slight fade of yellow below the scale line as an accent.

On hardwood crankbaits. I don't want to split the bait and install a wire frame for hardware so I make my own hook hanger and line tie "screws". I think commercial screw eyes are too large and obtrusive for small bass crankbaits. A brass line tie is easy to tune and will give the crank a chance to "hunt". But brass is not ideal for hook hangers due to its softness. I use a decent pair of Grobet wire bending pliers and start with about 5" of wire. For line ties, I use spool .0403 soft brass wire. .032 brass wire will hunt even better but is on the ragged edge of being too light, IMO. For hook hangers, I use .029 Malin Hard Wire stainless steel leader (coffee color) which comes coiled in a handy plastic envelope. The SS wire makes a very strong, low profile hook hanger. Plus, you can adjust the ring size to get exactly what you want. Method: Brass wire is easy to twist clockwise on itself (both strands) to form a tightly wound screw. For the SS hangers, it's too hard to hand twist 2 strands together so I leave one strand straight and twist the other around it, leaving some space between the wraps for added glue surface. Needlenose pliers "true up" the screw after twisting and a pair of wire cutters trims to length. A 5/64" hole drilled with a Dremel is perfect for either screw. Push epoxy in the hole with a wire and coat the screw with epoxy. The shape and constant diameter of the screw gives you plenty of glue surface. Screw them into the hole counter-clockwise. They won't ever pull out.

The point of a drying wheel is to let the finish cure without shifting due to gravity. As long as the bait rotates through 360 deg, its orientation is shouldn't be a factor. I attach mine any which way the alligator clips will grab them, and don't see a difference.

I'm a hobbist (mostly a fisherman) who builds bass and striper lures from basswood or balsa, 2-8 at a time. I use a template to trace the blanks and sand them with a Dremel and by hand. With minimal care, it's not hard to get sanded blanks within 1 or 2 100ths oz of each other. For balsa, I scribe a longitudinal center line and some lines for the contour of the head and tail. Otherwise, it's easy to go too far too fast, and get the lure out of symetry. When I want a lure that will suspend or rise slowly, I use basswood. You have to add so much ballast to balsa to suspend it that the weight kills the action, IMO. When I want a shallow lure with lively action that rises quickly, balsa is superb. Since it's so bouyant, any reasonable amount of ballast will be a floater. I take care to weigh components with basswood lures, to get slow risers/suspenders. I also use Devcon, guestimating it will add about 1/100th ounce for each inch of lure length, for most bass lures. For balsa, I also apply an undercoat of Devcon to waterproof and toughen the lure. For basswood, I undercoat with polyurethane to stop the grain rising when painted with latex paint. That's a "nice to do" , not a "must do" - a slightly raised grain will disappear when clearcoated with Devcon. You get used to working with any type wood after a few cranks and some trial and error. I think it's much easier to work with hardwoods like basswood. It works slower and you have more time to see where you're going with the shaping and sanding. Basswood is super nice - uniform density, close grain, sands beautifully. As for digital scales - I think of mine as an indispensable tool when doing a run of basswood cranks. Before using one, I sometimes had to drill out excess ballast to correct a sinker, or I found a suspender was really a floater. I hate redrilling a finished crank! With the scale, I get a consistent result. Quality control. And if I change some elements of a known design, the scale allows me to compensate for the changes and come out with a crank that will still have the same bouyancy behavior.

I order mine online from McMaster-Carr www.mcmaster.com,, who have competitive prices and good service. Unless you are making big fish lures, I'd go with the thinnest bill material available. It dives deeper and deflects off of cover better. Not as durable - but polycarbonate is tough in any thickness. If you're making them for yourself you might as well go whole hog IMO. McMaster also carries G-10 (aka Micarta, F4, circuit board, etc) in .032" sheets, which is great for thin lips on shallow cranks and jerkbaits. Not as tough as Lexan but it's popular among pro fishermen. G-10 is a high pressure laminate of epoxy over a substrate of fiberglass, linen or other binder material. McMaster's G-10 is gold colored (linen?) but I prefer G-10 based on fiberglass, which is light green. Same physical properties, I just like green better. Of course, if you paint it, it won't matter.

Well, this is a flat shallow bass crank that is 2.5" long and 1/3" wide, with a G-10 "circuitboard" lip. Kiln dried basswood. Similar baits I've built were 1/4" longer and suspended at .38 oz "ready to fish" weight. After reading the displacement weighting posts, thought I'd try it to see how it works. Had I guestimated the ballast required, I'd have gone with .11 oz of lead for a finished weight of .37 oz - which I'm sure would have been within .01 oz of correct to suspend. But I thought "what the heck, better living through science". I still want to use the technique if I can get it to work because I think it will be useful for crankbait designs that I have no experience with. But right now I'm dubious.

I tried the water displacement vs dry weight procedure and didn't get the right weight to suspend my crankbait. I weighed the sanded/drilled blank at .14 oz. The water displacement weight using the tare adjustment on my scale was .33 oz. The bill, line tie, hook hangers, trebles and split rings totaled .09 oz. Paint and epoxy clearcoat were .03 oz. I figure the ballast required to suspend as: .33 - .14 - .09 - .03 = .07 oz ballast. The finished bait weighed .33 oz as expected but it was a medium fast riser, not a suspender. Where did I go wrong? Two possibilities I can think of: 1) My ballast is rosin core lead electrical solder. Could the rosin evaporate during installation and reduce the ballast weight? 2) Should the line tie and hook hangers NOT be counted in the formula since they are inside the body on the finished crank? They weighed .04 oz. If not counted, the ballast would have been .11 oz, for a total crank weight of .37 oz - which is right on the money for suspending this type crankbait in my experience. Archaemedes won't answer emails. Maybe one of you can suggest where I went astray? Thanks!

Some guys build a certain crank and have it "down pat", with precast belly weights, laser cut bills, machined blanks, etc. Not me; I have a couple that I build more than others but I'm always trying new colors, different bills, weights, shapes etc. One tool I'm finding indispensable is a digital "gram scale", an electronic scale that can measure in grams or hundredths of an ounce, up to 6-8 ounces. I bought a Digiweigh (of course made in China) scale off Ebay for $25 incl shipping. Pretty cheap. I'm sure there are more accurate scales but as long as it's measurements are fairly linear I don't care if it is a few percent off a standard reference weight. What's important is being able to compare the relative weights of components in successive crankbaits. If you want a crank to behave in a predictable manner: floater, sinker, slow riser, suspender; it's the best way to get there. I keep notes on component weights of all my cranks - bill, hangers, line tie, sanded blank, lead ballast, painted blank, clearcoated crank, hooks and split rings. The notes make it easy to get within .02 ounces of a crankbait's target weight. And that's critical if you build successive prototypes where you are adjusting components to come up with that "perfect crank". Using one has made my crankbaits much better performers and has removed many of the "mysteries" about why things don't work as intended. Highly recommended!

I'm sure you learned some valuable stuff while producing your first bait - I've sure screwed up my share! I think good foiling is one of the most difficult techniques in crank building. I've built about a hundred now and still won't foil a bait unless it's UNAVOIDABLE. Good luck with it!

I use locking forceps and it works very well. You can buy them for 2-3 bucks ea. When I'm spraying a scale pattern and need to use both hands, I clamp the forceps in an articulating vise.

I'm with Skeeter about balancing versus suspending. It sounds like your main criteria should be to suspend. Suspending baits will dive a couple of feet deeper than floaters so that should help you get down. One "X Factor": what is the temp at the depth you want the crank to suspend? There can be a big difference between the surface and 20 ft. A slow sinker will probably reach a depth naturally where colder water suspends it. Most lakes, most days, it's probably unknowable without a temp gauge on a 30 ft line. And if you know, do you have the right crank in the boat? As a practical matter, I'd chest weight a crank to suspend and then use suspendots to fine tune it for colder water. If you really want to go deep you can also try sinkers. As long as you're fishing deep open water, snagging is not an issue. But too much weight will kill the action, so you need to be a little conservative. A good alternative is to use a line weight a couple of feet ahead of the crankbait. There was an article on this in a recent Bassmaster Mag where a couple of tournament anglers had been doing that and cleaning up. Oh, btw - use fluorocarbon line!

After struggling with the same problem, I bought some "eye dotters" from staminainc.com. They are 3" plastic sticks with small foam balls on the ends. They pick up the right amount of paint and touching them to the lure makes a nice round raised 3D eye. Come in a package of 5 for not much $, and you can rinse them clean with water and reuse them if you're painting acrylics.