BobP

No, I wouldn't use it because it is water based. The sealers getting good reports on TU are solvent based high solids concrete sealers like Direct Colors AC1315. Why? Most water based coatings can reabsorb water during fishing and turn white/soften. I don't know that the Lowes product does this, but why take the chance? You also should prefer a "high solids" sealer because after the solvent carrier evaporates, the solids content of the sealer is what's left behind on your lure. The more solids it contains, the thicker and stronger the coating left behind. I've used just about every topcoat touted here on TU. For balsa baits, I still like epoxy because it is thick and tough and levels out beautifully over minor surface irregularities on a balsa body. I give all the other candidate topcoats a shot and I like some of them when repainting plastic baits - but epoxy is still King on balsa in my book.

Yes, I'm using Solarez right now to undercoat my wood baits. I think its durability is close to epoxy and it's very fast to use. I lightly sand it after it's cured to remove the glaze and the wax flakes that rise to its surface during the cure. I brush it on the crankbaits and then put them on my lure turner for a few minutes so that it levels out, then put the still running turner out in the driveway to cure in the sun for 10-15 minutes. I also have a nail UV light but sun curing is just simpler and easier to me. At about $25 a quart, it's pretty cost efficient compared to most other coatings.

Assuming you use water based acrylic paint, if you didn't seal the wood you would get raised wood grain when you applied your paint. And everything you do while finishing a bait usually "prints through" to the final finish appearance. In addition, for most of us, sealing or undercoating a bait is a matter of durability. Put a tough waterproof coating on the wood before you paint, followed up with a tough waterproof topcoat, and you get a bait that will last much longer and retain its finish much better than one without the undercoating.

Kelly, I make my own lips, it's easy to do, I save $, and the online sources don't carry many models and sizes. To do your own, you need a lip template from somewhere. You can fold a sheet of card stock, draw half the lip shape and cut it out. Alternatively, I use a shareware CAD program called Powerdraw to design lips. Why? You draw the lip to the exact dimensions you need in the program and then simply print it out on any inkjet printer, and it comes out exactly the right size to use. Shape and symmetry are guaranteed. You can also save the file on your computer if you need it in the future. Anyway, once I have a printout of the lip shape, I transfer it to a piece of clear plastic to make a durable template and then cut that out to make the final template. Lay the template on your lip material, trace it with a fine point Sharpie, and you're ready to cut your lip out. The fastest way to do that on a single sheet of lip material is to use a pair of metal snips. I use the straight cut compound metal snips I bought at Home Depot for about $12. Cut about a mm outside your lip lines, then sand down to the line with a Dremel tool outfitted with a fine grit sanding cylinder. It takes about as long to do it as it does to describe how to do it. This works on circuit board or polycarbonate lips. I like to use 1/32" thick G-10 and 1/16" thick polycarbonate for lips.

JRammit, I also think repeatability is very important. The problem for me is that a power tool doesn't necessarily make that any easier than a hand tool - unless you are making only a few designs and are willing to build a number of jigs for them that can guarantee repeatability. I do a lot of marking on my baits with a good draftsman's compass to describe the limits for rounding over baits, tapering, finding center lines, etc. It's a boring, exacting process but once marked it doesn't really matter how you remove the material as long as you can do it accurately, nor how you drill the holes as long as they are on the center line of the bait. I really don't think a bench mounted sander or drill press will do it quicker or more accurately than a Dremel with the right tool head. At least that's been true for me. I'm not casting aspersions on guys using whatever tools they like to build baits. I'm just saying there are alternatives to a suite of bench mounted power tools and you can still build good baits with a more modest array of tools.

I guess I live in an alternative universe. If I were building a hundred baits per week, I'd have a plethora of power tools set up in my garage, most of them outfitted with custom jigs. But I'm a hobby guy building about 100 baits per year, of various designs. Building a good bait doesn't depend on how many power tools you have. It depends on how much accuracy and judgement you can apply to the craft with whatever tools you choose. The only bench tool on my workbench, and then only when used, is a Makita scroll saw that I bought reconditioned on Ebay 15 yrs ago for $125. I use a hand held rotary sander/polisher to size the thickness of baits (out in the driveway). It's also handy to wax my boat and vehicles. Other than that, everything is done with a Murphy Carving knife, a Dremel tool and loose sandpaper. I don't want to do anything that produces saw dust inside the house. You are not gonna be a popular guy with your wife --- or your dog. I realize if you live in an apartment, there are constraints. But there are alternatives when making baits and some of them don't include bench power tools. Using a Murphy knife to take off most of the material when I'm rounding over a blank is the thing that has reduced the amount of sawdust I produce the most. And it's just as quick as a sander. .

I have some baits that are real killers. The reside in the deep recesses of my tackle box, to be used only rarely. I can't imagine cutting one up to see why it works so well because I failed to make detailed notes on it when it was being built. It would be like chopping up your Lamborghini because you wanted to try to make something similar. Ain't gonna happen.

That would work easily on a joint that uses a single pair of screw eyes, but how would you unscrew them if the joint has 2 pairs of screw eyes? I guess you'd have to pry one of the screw eyes of each pair apart to separate the joint, adjust the depth, then try to force them closed again in the very restricted space between the segments. Possible? Yes, but....?

I say forget about copyrighting, etc. All of that is worth only what you are willing to spend in legal costs to defend and I can't imagine a custom builder coming out ahead in that equation. What I would concentrate on is the false use of your company name in his advertising. It costs nothing to send a letter threatening him with legal action unless he desists from doing that. In many cases that works since the recipient is usually ignorant of the legal environment. Even if he knows it's impractical for you, he'll be unsure whether you are made enough to do it anyway.

Mark, I epoxy a screw eye from each of the two pairs into one side of the joint and then finish the the lure including topcoat. I drill 2 holes in the other section, including countersink recesses and then epoxy the other ends of the screw eye pairs in to finish the bait. That's the point at which I set the gap by pushing the screw eyes in to a depth that I want the gap to be. Pretty simple. Since I use hand wound screw eyes, don't know if I could ever unscrew one out of a cured epoxy bed but that's academic since having 2 pairs of screw eyes in the joint would prevent me from doing that anyway. I've never tried to unscrew an epoxied hand wound screw eye from a bait and suspect the wire would bend before I could break it loose. On the other hand, I've never had one ever fail over many hundreds of installations, so you get what you get.

Mark, I'm assuming your bait is fashioned from PVC as usual? You have no worries about the pin shaft causing leaks into the bait because PVC is non-absorptive. Guys working in wood do.

I can't remember details on baits I made a week ago, much less 2 years ago! But I don't have to because I keep a notebook to record all the data on every batch of baits I make. How else can you replicate a bait that you like, or change specs on a bait that did not perform as you wanted? The worst thing I can imagine is building a bait, finding out that it catches bass like crazy, and then being unable to replicate the bait because you can't remember how it was built.

Personally I prefer screw eyes connected together. More specifically, I like to make the screw eyes myself from stainless wire so I can control the gap between body sections. For me this has been a lot less finicky than using a pin configuration and it seems to have less chance of binding. On a minnow bait, I use 2 pairs of interconnected screw eyes on the joint and I can recess the heads of the screws into the body segments to make an unobtrusive joint. I'm sure other guys prefer a pinned joint but it seems to me that if you're working with wood, that offers increased chances for water intrusion.

A balsa bait of the same total weight as a basswood (or other hardwood) bait will have a considerable difference in weight distribution, so will have a different action. Maybe better, maybe worse. If you really want to clone a bait, you need to use the same kind of wood, the same total weight, the same lip, lip angle, line tie position, ballast position and weight, etc, to get it close. Otherwise you are basically designing your own bait from scratch. Not a bad thing if you can prototype it enough to get the action you want. I've fished a variety of Tapp style custom baits and built several series of them myself. They all look similar but they all have different actions. I have to admit that building them to get exactly the action I wanted was not an easy task. Good luck with yours!

I'm unclear what the problem is: is the bait too hard to reel down to depth, or do you want it to dive more quickly? A wider lip would dive more quickly and will have greater cranking resistance, all other factors held equal. But these Tapp style baits naturally have a tight action and are quite sensitive to the lip size and line tie position, so you can experiment with lip width and ballast size/position but know that most changes will affect the action negatively. My favorite Tapp style bait is sold by Tenessee Tuffy. They have very good action and are sold at a good price, and have been my favorite commercial model when I'm "rolling my own"..

I'm partial to the Dick Nite S81 Fishermun's Lurecoat, which is a great moisture cured urethane for topcoating. For paint, I use regular acrylic latex Createx shot directly on the metal with an airbrush and it has worked for me. The topcoat soaks through it and bonds with the metal underneath. However, for even more durability, you can use Dick Nite lacquer paints, which can be used with an airbrush, or a brush, or dipped. Dick Nite's main business is spoon production. He sells his coating to hobbyists as a sideline and you can get a TU discount on the urethane here: http://www.dicknite.com/TU_Lander.htm

To me anything smaller than 2" is a pain to cut out, shape, and sand. Not saying it can't be done with lots of care but I shape baits by hand and 2" is about the limit that I can handle comfortably with my fingers. I also mark shaping and sanding lines on my baits to insure symmetry. That's very difficult on a 1 1/2" bait. You also need to be very conservative in how you sand, mostly using finer grit paper. In the end, if I want a bait shorter than 2", I start looking for pre-formed wood blanks online.

When I need to patch small surface imperfections in a bait, like the cut line where I halved a balsa bait to install the hardware, I just use plain old Elmer's spackling/wood filler compound, either exterior or interior, doesn't really matter. Is it durable? No. But you'll cover it with a durable undercoating and topcoat so it doesn't matter. I see using a high durability coating as "gilding the lily" in this application.

I've had similar experiences when curing the stuff with a salon fingernail UV lamp. Human eyes are not built to withstand strong UV radiation. That's why they're built to enclose the hand and I'd never remove the protective/reflective base plate from one of the lamps as was done in the You Tube video. It does help to wear a pair of polarized sunglasses when using a UV light. Bottom line, I now put my lures on a lure turner and set it out in the driveway for awhile to cure in the sun. It cures just as hard that way, even on a cloudy day. I reserve my salon UV light for emergencies when I want to cure resin after sundown - which happens darned seldom.

Obviously another UV cured polyester resin. What would be interesting is whether it develops a white blush like Solarez often does while curing - and, of course, the price per quart.

Looks great! And if Hughesy says it's so ... it's so.

I think Devcon 2 Ton would be good. Even if you want the wing to flex, you don't want the part in the slot to flex. It also depends on what exact material you chose for the wing. Some plastics don't adhere to certain glues but if you rough up the area to be glued, epoxy will grab it. It's even better if you cut some small slots into the wing's glue area.

Hard to say what was my first lure. I started out modifying deep diving wood crankbaits by adding weight, repainting, etc. I guess my first build came after I bought a commercial balsa crankbait and it fell apart after 3 hours in the water. I decided if I had to pay bucks to fish something that lasted 3 hours, I might be able to build one for less money that lasted longer and worked just as well. It took a few tries, but eventually I did that. My first was ugly as sin and would only catch catfish, for some reason. But it was onward and upward after that.

Never heard of them. It's strange that none of the descriptions say what species of wood is used. Looks like basswood, but???