BobP

An Iwata Revolution BR is what I use and it sells for around $90 online. Buy a hose and air control valve for any tool compressor and you're in business. I use a Porter Cable 135 psi unit with a 6 gal tank for air. The Iwata has a .3 mm tip which is a good general size for crankbait painting. Total cost around $250. There are some low cost Chinese airbrush compressors that advertise 45 psi and greater, which I think would be acceptable. Can't give you a site, but you can find them if you do some online research.

Paulownia is a very good crankbait wood due to its strength and buoyancy (nominally 18 lbs/cu ft). The trouble with buying it is that there are a lot of online sources that want to sell you "miracle paulownia trees" instead of cut and seasoned wood planks. But you can usually find it online if you keep looking.

The biggest gripe I had with lower cost airbrush sets was the air pressure on the compressor was too low for my taste. They advertise the max pressure that the compressor will develop but that is almost always about 15 psi higher than you actually get one second after you pull the trigger on your air brush. So the "30 psi" claim on a Chinese brush compressor actually means you get a sustained psi of around 15 psi, which is too low to shoot some of the pearls and flake paints that are popular with crankbait painters. I took a look at some of the Master G22 offerings online and none of them stated the pressure that the compressor would develop, so I'd be wary until I knew what that is. Personally, I want a max pressure of 45 psi or greater for a compressor since that suggests that it will shoot sustained at 30 psi when I want it to. Like Mark says, you get what you pay for. One thing that many of us have opted to do is use a tool compressor that incorporates an air tank for airbrushing. Lots of pressure available. No pulsing of air like you can often get with a small tankless compressor. You can also use it for other chores around the house/garage if needed. Airbrushes are precision devices. Discount airbrushes may work just fine or they may not. Some guys use them and like them. But if they get out of adjustment, it can be hard to make them work right again and replacement parts can be a crap shoot. Bottom line, if that's what you can afford, it may be worth a shot but know you may be wishing for a brush from Iwata, Paasche, or another name brand before too long.

Specialized Balsa is where I bought my last batch, Ben. Some guys are probably saying to themselves "why would I want to pay a 40-100% premium for hand selected density?" To each his own and I'm as cheap as anyone, but my opinion is that the cost of the raw materials for a crankbait is so cheap on a per bait basis that it's well worth the modest added expense. The REAL cost of a crankbait is all the work and time you put into crafting it. $50 of hand selected balsa will probably last me 5 years as a hobby builder. Little more than the cost of one meal at McDonalds, per year. I mostly use balsa for fat shallow square bills so I order the 3" wide 1" thick boards too in order to minimize waste.

I'm with Ben on this. I can hardly imagine one unthinned coat of ETEX being thick enough for any bait except a plastic one. I tried it on wood and it needed at least 2 coats. That said, yes you can thin epoxy with denatured alcohol and it will still cure hard, but with slightly increased cure time. I haven't tried it with ETEX but thin Devcon with it all the time. ETEX already contains some solvent to facilitate flow and release of bubbles. It requires very little alcohol to thin epoxy, so best be conservative. I just dip my brush in alcohol and mix a few drops into the epoxy after it has been mixed. A little dab'll do ya!

I don't have pike or musky where I fish. Even in balsa, I've stopped using thru-wire construction in favor of hand twisted stainless wire screw eyes. I make them longer in soft balsa and I always epoxy them into any bait I make, regardless of the kind of wood used. So far, none have ever pulled out in 15 years of use. I think thru-wiring is beneficial in only one scenario. You build a bait in which the thru-wire is one continuous wire that includes the line tie and both hook hangers. You hook a fish that is violent enough to destroy the body of the bait. The thru-wire allows you to boat the fish regardless, after which you have to discard the bait anyway. Never had a bass that could do that to one of my baits, so I don't see the need of going to the trouble of thru-wiring any more. JMHO

I also use denatured alcohol to thin Devcon. I tried acetone many years ago and had all kinds of trouble with the epoxy. I agree with Ben that the acetone flashes off so quickly that it should probably not be leaving behind any solvent that would compromise your mix, just used to clean a brush. I use lacquer thinner to clean my brush and it works fine too. I suspicion that your bubbles are being caused by air inside the wood that is trying to escape when the wood is brought to a higher temperature after application of the epoxy. I keep the bait at the same temp as it was during application of the epoxy while it cures to avoid that problem. It will cure hard in any ambient temp down to 40 degrees, in my experience.

The first batch of balsa I bought was 6lb "competition balsa". It made VERY buoyant baits but was also very soft and required lots of reinforcement to make it durable. When I eventually ran out, I bought 12lb balsa which is the mean average of balsa density, which runs from 6 to 18 lbs per cubic foot. It's still pretty soft wood. When I want to use a wood that has 18lbs/cu ft density, I like to use paulownia instead of heavy balsa because for the same density, it is much harder and doesn't require special reinforcement.

I cut most bill slots 10mm deep and that has worked OK for me. Lip angle is a complicated problem. There are very general guidelines but there are a lot of factors that influence how a bait will swim and you have to get them all working together for the best results. The simplest scenario is a shallow running (2-5 ft) bait with the line tie on the nose of the body that is ballasted to swim in a a straight ahead attitude parallel to the surface of the water. A general guideline is that a lip set at about 45 degrees will give you a good combination of depth and wiggle. A greater angle will dive shallower but will have more wiggle, and vice-versa. Like Dale pointed out, if the bait swims with a head-down attitude, that changes the "effective angle" of the lip as it moves through the water. It gets quite complicated since the lip shape, width, and length interact with the body's shape, size and ballast positioning to determine how the whole bait will perform. The best advice I can give is to model your bait on a commercial bait whose action you like. Most of them have been tested and tweaked extensively. Take your copy on the water, test it out, and then you will have a starting point from which you can then begin to experiment and tweak your bait to perform to your expectations.

Your tool set reflects a number of things. How much money you have to spend. How proficient you are with various hand or power tools and how proficient you want to learn to be with them in the future. How many and how fast you need/want to turn out baits. What your attitudes and prejudices are about building baits. How much patience and time you have. Every one of us has different answers to those questions and as we develop as bait makers we refine the tool set and methods we use. There is no wrong answer. The usefulness of TU is it exposes you to tools, methods, and bait designs that are new to you. Things you had not considered or been exposed to.

You can use a variety of tools, from very simple to "all power, all the time". A minimalist tool assortment might include a wood carving knife, sandpaper., and a drill. What's really important is that your tools and your ability allow you to shape a symmetrical body and install the hardware on the centerline of the bait. Most guys appreciate having a bandsaw or a scroll saw and.some kind of powered sander (disk, belt, etc). I've been building crankbaits for many years with a scroll saw, a disk sander, and a Dremel as my power tools. More power tools make the process faster, but not necessarily better. Fewer power tools require more patience and more ability to hand shape wood. After building the body and installing hardware, you also have to paint and topcoat the bait. About 95% of us use an airbrush to do that, but again, you can get by with aerosol paints. Putting the finish on the bait is the major topic of interest here on TU, so you should read posts on the subject.

Off the top of my head, that looks like a Japanese brand lure due to the finish, the clarity of the plastic, and the internal structure. That's as close as I can come, however.

To each his own - if it works, it works. I like buying wood from a supplier who dries the wood and in the case of balsa, can provide a specific density of product. More expensive than getting it from a lumber yard or out in the woods but it's just less hassle and uncertainty when I use it in a bait. Where the heck am I gonna find a balsa tree in N.C. Anyway? I find that less variability in wood = more baits that perform the way I want them to and the easier it is to repeat that in a series of baits. There's so many ways to screw up a crankbait! I've tried them all! Considering the cost of the raw materials versus the work you put into a crankbait and the value of a good wood crankbait, wood cost seems neglidgeable to me. And a thing I don't have to worry about is a good thing. That said, I recognize the charm and sense of accomplishment you might get from using locally sourced materials.

The white I use most is Polytranspar Superhide White. It covers very well and dries fast to a hard smooth coating, compared to Createx.

I think you'll find a lot of differences in how cheap hobby acrylics shoot. Some work OK, some won't shoot through even the largest tip airbrush. That's because there's no need to mill the color particles to any specific size. I started out with them years ago but eventually switched to airbrush paint when the modest savings did not equal the hassles I was having with them, especially when I tried to shoot them through a brush with a small .3mm tip size. Acrylic paint of any description lasts a long time. As a hobby builder, I order paint maybe once a year so buying good paint seems justified. I generally don't thin airbrush paint. I also use a lot of pre-mixed taxidermy acrylics that don't need thinning and I buy them in 4oz bottles. I've tried the Pledge floor finish and it works well but if you fail to clean your brush thoroughly afterwards, it will weld the needle of the brush to the packing nut in the brush, which I don't like. That's my experience. Your's may differ and it's certainly player's choice.

Water is a solvent too. Most of us think of solvents as being alcohol or petroleum based coatings, and most finish coating problems arise when petroleum based solvents react with one another to wrinkle or bubble a finish. It isn't always clear what exactly a coating contains and it can be hard to find this out. For example, there's a difference between virgin lacquer thinner and the Klean Strip lacquer thinner that many of us buy at a home improvement store. What is it? I think the Klean Strip can contain just about anything the company wants to throw into the batch. And I don't really know what "virgin" thinner contains either. Just as important is what a builder THINKS defines a particular type of coating and what role he thinks it plays in his coating regimen. What really is a "primer"? What is an undercoating? Are they different from a wood waterproofing coating? Or is epoxy a primer? Does it become a primer if you sand it before applying the paint? Reading TU posts over many years, it's clear that there are about as many answers as there are TU'ers. So I think you are wading in turbulent water. All I can say for sure is there are combinations of finish coatings that through experimentation and general usage among builders seem to work well while others don't.

I don't recall hearing about problems clear coating water based acrylic with automotive solvent based cleats. Where a problem can arise is using them over a solvent based paint, primer, etc that may contain incompatible solvents that have not fully out-gassed before application. That's fairly rare but considering the witch's brew of coatings you hear about here on TU, it sometimes happens.

Glow paint glows because of strontium aluminate particles. The larger the particles, the better the glow. Like Mark, I use a GloNation product, but got the acrylic paint pre-mixed. The white paint glows with a greenish color. But its particles are much too large to pass through an airbrush. You can buy glow paint that an airbrush can handle but it's a catch 22: the much smaller particles will not glow as much. Mark's solution of adding glow powder to the topcoat is a neat solution since most of us brush our topcoats anyway.

If you Google it, you'll get several links including Amazon.com sources. There is a difference between fluorescent and glow in the dark paint. Fluorescent paint only glows when exposed to black light.. I don't know if the "fluorescent" Createx colors actually do that or whether their use of the term is just meant to mean "bright" for marketing purposes. The probably do since the paint is used for t-shirt painting. Maybe if you're night fishing with a black light you could see it, but the bass can't. Glow in the dark paint stores light energy and releases it over a period of time, and it can be seen by fish. When I want a bright reflective white, I use White Pearl acrylic from Van Dyke's Nature's Gallery. I paint jigging spoons with glow in the dark paint but the best of this type paint can't be sprayed because the glow grains are too large.

If your bait's body is symmetrical, if the hardware Is installed accurately on the bait's centerline, and if the lip is centered on the bait and is of a design that is correct for the size of the lure and the fore/aft balance, you have a pretty good chance of the bait performing well. My advice is to pick a commercial bait that you admire and copy it as closely as you can. If successful, you can later modify the design to better satisfy your particular performance targets. Balsa is very light and buoyant and tends to make a bait that is very lively. PVC trim board is a little less buoyant but it is waterproof due to its closed cell structure and it is a harder material so requires less reinforcement and waterproofing. It is a great option for someone starting out in bait building since it requires fewer finish steps. Water intrusion kills trolling baits and PVC avoids that issue completely.

Unless it has an air tank as part of the assembly, an air brush compressor has to run whenever you pull the trigger on your brush. These small compressors don't develop much pressure compared to a tool compressor, so they switch on whenever air is demanded by the brush. Short answer,-yes, it's normal.

About expensive Iwata nozzles - I checked one source that had the nozzle for my .2mm HP+ at $43. Sort of makes you want to take care of them! I guess you have to expect that on a precision manufactured tiny little part. You definitely need magnification to check the status of one.

I guess they can get enlarged but it is much more common that they get split by rough cleaning, or clogged with dried finish. In my experience, the very small screw-in nozzles on Iwata and similar brands of brushes are pretty delicate. Soft stainless steel. Another problem you can have is the needle and the nozzle becoming mis-fitted so the brush cannot shoot a clean spray pattern. Iwata factory has a tech adjust the needle to the nozzle during manufacturing and he/she shoots a beautiful little pattern on paper that you get when you buy the brush. But if you bend the original needle, bump the nozzle against a hard surface, or buy a new nozzle or needle, the custom fit is down the drain and you're on your own. Bottom line is that unless you know the "black magic" of contouring and adjusting a new needle to perfectly fit the nozzle, your Iwata will probably never shoot as well as it did straight out of the box. So it pays to be very careful with an Iwata needle and that tiny little Iwata nozzle that's half the size if a grain of rice. Brands like Paasche and Badger generally use larger needles and cones (not screw-in nozzles) that are less exact but also less prone to damage. That said, I ain't giving up my Iwatas. They're just too good.

I agree with Ben about the Cactus Juice. I think the reason we use balsa is its buoyancy. Compromise the buoyancy and we might as well use a harder wood that requires fewer measures to reinforce it. I believe the vacuum process is mainly intended for guys who build wood pens, knife handles and such. Yeah, using prop is a decent alternative IF you can find some to buy. A couple of TUers sold the stuff awhile ago, but one of them passed away and I haven't seen the othe post in a few years.

I topcoat a lot with moisture cured urethane but don't use it as an undercoating. On balsa, I like a good thick undercoating that reinforces the soft wood and MCU is too thin for that, imo.