BobP

Sorry Rob but I don't have a pic. It's fairly simple. Most wired lips have a straight shank running underneath the lip and glued straight into a channel cut into the bottom center of the lip slot. In this variation, you do the same thing but instead of simply gluing the wire in a channel under the lip, you make the wire a little longer and bend it up into a slot in the back of the lip and then forward toward the front of the lip, cutting it to length so the wire doesn't protrude outside the nose of the bait. When you glue in the lip, you have to cut a channel in both the center bottom and the center top of the lip slot to fit the wire into.

I cut balsa baits in half and lay in the wire form, then glue the halves back together with 5 min epoxy. When back together, there is always a little scar that runs around the perimeter of the bait. I just use Elmer's interior or exterior wood filler. The interior filler is basically like spackling compound. But it gets covered with a durable undercoating of epoxy or Solarez, plus a topcoat of epoxy - so no harm/no foul.

Yet another variation. Do the haywire twist for the whole length of the wire. Cut a small slot in the center back of the lip and bend the wire up and through the slot, then forward over the top of the lip. This gives you a tight little lip package. Downside is you have to cut two channels in the lip slot, one for the bottom wire and one for the top. Personally, I haven't had a twisted wire hanger or line tie fail using a simple haywire twist for the whole wire shank so that's what I use most often. I approve of using both a belt and suspenders but there are enough bad things that can (and eventually do) happen to a wood crankbait during use that you have to judge the advantage versus the extra work and weight involved with every embellishment. But it's good to have options.

Predator Bass Baits (http://www.predatorbassbaits.com/id69.html) carries a Megabass 110 jerkbait that is a very popular style. He has tested the baits and has info on the site to get them to do (suspend, sink, rise) what you want them to do.

Another wire to consider is saltwater stainless leader wire. Malin, again, is a prime producer. I've used their .029 190 lb test wire and it is much thinner than what I would use in soft stainless but I don't foresee any fish breaking 190 lb test wire. It is made to be more ductile than hard stainless wire so that it can be formed into wire leaders with barrel twists but is harder than soft stainless. I still prefer the soft stainless for shallow baits because it is easy to tune without damaging the finish on the nose of the bait.

The best white color basecoat I've ever used is Polytranspar Superhide White. Has lots of pigment to hide quickly, dries fast and is harder than typical acrylic latex paint (which it is). A lot of taxidermy paint companies carry a white paint designed for color basecoating. Even cheap hobby paint like Apple Barrel White has lots of pigment and can be used for basecoating - but it has a rougher surface texture than airbrush paint and like any hobby paint, it can be a problem to shoot through many airbrushes. Nothing wrong with Createx White - but compared to the alternatives, it doesn't cover grain as quickly.

I use a few Auto-Air colors. They're not exactly like Createx but the ones I got can be shot right out of the bottle. If you don't like mixing and thinning paint, suggest you check into taxidermy paints at taxidermy.net, a gateway site to various providers. Taxidermy paint comes in both acrylic latex and lacquer formulations and is almost always thinned ready-to-shoot. There is a wide selection of colors designed for painting fish, including flakes and pearls. My favorite brand is Smith Wildlife Colors.

There's a lot of confusion about this because guys sometimes sling around words like primer, basecoat, and undercoat interchangeably. Primers are coatings that adhere to a surface and to the paint that is put over them. Adhesion is their function. A basecoat usually refers to a color basecoat, which is a solid color put on a lure to hide underlying wood grain or internal plastic bait features so that the main colors that follow it will look uniform. An undercoat may mean anything but when I use it, I mean a coating on raw wood that waterproofs it and prevents wood grain from rising when later hit with water based paint. When I finish a wood bait, I undercoat it with epoxy, then lightly sand the epoxy to promote paint adhesion. Then I color basecoat the bait, usually with heavily pigmented white paint, then I shoot my colors. When I paint a plastic bait, I lightly sand the plastic to promote adhesion and then follow with the basecoat and color. I don't use a primer or adhesion promoter. Some guys like to use an aerosol adhesion promoter on plastic baits before they begin painting them. The bottom line is that you want a durable finish on your crankbait. How to get there can take several directions. And you need to worry about what coatings you mix on a bait. Some work well together, some refuse to work at all. Coatings with solvent in them can react badly with other coatings containing solvent, just depending on the particular solvents and how you apply and dry the coatings.

When you investigate a wrinkling problem with Dick Nite you need to be specific about what coatings, including primers and paint, are under the topcoat and also specific about how you apply and cure the DN. I use undercoating that does not contain solvent, paint with various brands of water based acrylic dried well with a hair dryer, then either quickly brush on the DN or dip the baits in it and hang them up so any excess DN drips off the tail of the bait before it can wrinkle the paint. Can't remember the last time I had a wrinkle.

The main "trick" is to use SOFT temper stainless steel wire. I use Malin .041" dia wire from McMaster-Carr. It is much easier to twist soft stainless wire and bend it accurately 90 degrees in the right place. You want the bend to be slightly below the eye to take the thickness of the lip material into account. I drill a hole with a micro drill bit and a Dremel in the lip surface that is just slightly smaller than the twisted wire that will go through it. Then, I use the bent line tie's sharp end to expand the hole until I can force the line tie through the lip and get a good friction fit. A little more twisting and you can work the bend of the shaft through the lip. If you do a good job, the shaft will lay neatly and close to the underside of the lip. On very deep diving baits where the line tie has a long run back to the nose of the bait, I usually run a bead of Devcon Two Ton along the shaft to eliminate any possible movement while the bait is used. On shallow to med divers, that's not needed. Soft stainless wire is ductile and easy to bend but when bent into a small circle for the eye, it is plenty strong enough for a bass bait, plus it is just soft enough to allow you to tune the bait without cracking the lip (or the finish on the nose of a bait with the line tie in the bait body). I bend wire with hand tools: a drill bit of the right diameter clamped in a vise around which to bend the eye; vise grip pliers to hold the wire while twisting, a pair of heavy lineman's pliers to grip the wire while I do the 90 degree bend, and to cut the shaft of the line tie to length.

Until epoxy begins to harden, it will migrate due to gravity. Devcon Two Ton is one of the faster "30 minute epoxies" but it still takes about 45 minutes before it hardens enough not to migrate - and that's at 75-80 degrees. If you have no turner, you can hang the bait up and then periodically reverse it for the 45 min required. Turn it frequently, about every minute at first, then gradually less often as it begins to stiffen. Putting a wire hanger on the front and rear of the bait makes the process much easier. The exercise will teach you that a lure turner is something you want to build sooner rather than later. There are other coatings, like Solarez UV cured polyester resin, moisture cured urethanes, and concrete sealers that are basically brush on and hang up coatings. They either cure fast (uv) or are so thin (mcu and sealer) that any excess drips off the lure before they harden. But epoxy is a great coating for many reasons and if you plan to build baits in the future, a lure turner is the way to go.

jonister, First, assume your bait body is symmetrical and the lip and hardware have been installed on its center line. I think the greatest cause for baits "peeling out" is a lip whose action overpowers the the bait. On shallow baits, the lip is too long. On baits where the line tie is on the lip surface, it is often because the line tie is too close to the body (closer to the body = more action). The action of a bait is a balance of the lip action and body; one way to correct a mismatch is to re-balance by adding ballast to the lure body. Another way is to trim the lip length on either style of lip.

Yeah, Smith Wildlife is my favorite taxidermy brand due to their consistency. Some taxidermy paint companies are small, not huge like Createx, so you may not get consistent formulations of paint bottle-to-bottle all the time. But Wildlife Colors has been consistent for me.

OK, Skeeter, don't be coy. What kind of action and "feel" do those guys want when they talk about a great crankbait? I know you've talked with them, probably knocked back a few with them, and have made crankbaits for many of them. If not, you'd be drummed out of Lexington. So in your opinion, what kind of action does the perfect 10 ft diver have? Fess up!

The devil is in the details. I tried it using acrylic crackle medium and could not get one side of the bait to look like the other. It takes some experimentation but if you are doing one surface like the back of a lure, you should be able to get a pattern that satisfies you. Just read the directions on the bottle and start from there.

A lot of pro tourney fishermen pool test the crankbaits they are given in bulk by sponsors to find a relatively small percentage of them they will use. As well as running depth, they want to see and feel the action of the baits. This is sort of disheartening if you think about it. The baits are made to as consistent a quality as possible by a manufacturer but an expert can still determine that maybe 25% are really good baits, 50% are just average, and 25% are not very good. Can we as custom wood builders do it better, more exactly, more repeatable than a factory building plastic baits? I doubt it. It takes time on the water to develop a feel about crankbaits but you can do it if you pay attention. Take one of your crankbaits that really catches fish well. Using a sensitive graphite rod and braid or fluoro line, throw it a few times and note the vibration it causes in your rod. Now take one that you tried to build exactly the same but doesn't catch fish and do the same thing. If you pay close attention, I bet you'll be able to tell there's a difference in the timing and intensity of the vibration. I build lots of shallow flat sided baits and the ones that catch fish best have a regular sharp staccato vibration that I can feel in my rod when retrieving them. I can't generalize this to other style baits because they are different by design, but it does give me ideas about how I want other designs to perform. And if I live long enough, build enough crankbaits, test enough, and pay enough attention I have hope.

I think crankbait builders use Solarez Gloss Resin, designed for a topcoat on surf boards. There are a lot of different Solarez varieties for different uses but most of us have only used that one, so I can't comment on their sanding resin. Someone here on TU asked the company about thinning Solarez and got the info from them but I don't remember what the thinner was - you might find it with a search of the posts. I like an "undercoating" on a bait, i.e., a tough durable waterproof coating on the raw wood that acts as a second barrier against damage and water absorption. Many "sanding sealers" are neither tough nor very waterproof - they just prevent wood grain from rising. I like a slow cure 30 minute glue epoxy. Devcon Two Ton is an example but there are many other brands that would fill the bill. It takes only one coat, levels well and cures faster (~6 hrs) than Etex. A UV cured resin has similar physical qualities when cured and is super fast. Here in the States, it's much cheaper than epoxy or many other candidate products. UV cured resins are used in lots of processes, like making printed paper glossy, etc., so they are widely available - you might research your area and contact suppliers to discuss your needs. It's a relatively new product for us bait builders so there's not much depth of knowledge about it.

I used hot veggy oil to heat polycarbonate until it became limp, then laid it on a curved surface of the shape I wanted, just as an experiment. It seemed to work pretty easily but it's a "touchy" process as far as how limp you want the polycarbonate to get, and getting the lip onto its mold without marring it, causing it to develop bubbles, or bending it while it gets too cool and develops strain marks. With some experimentation, you can probably work out a process but it's pretty finicky.

I would think there's a supplier of UV cured polyester somewhere closer to you than California.

A lot of musky builders like Etex. I started out with D2T on bass baits and never felt a need to try others. Check out a User Submitted Tutorial on using Etex submitted by Fatfingers. His results are certainly outstanding if you look at his baits in the Gallery. However, we're talking about undercoating here and not topcoating. If you are looking for something faster to use, Etex ain't.

Not sure about which you are asking, but - D2T levels out as well as any slow cure epoxy, that is to say excellently. The UV cure polyester from Solarez I brush on and then put it on my lure turner to level out for 5-10 minutes before curing it. It is a fairly thick product with a viscosity slightly less than freshly mixed D2T. One coat is plenty thick for a bass bait and probably for a musky bait too, just IMO. An added plus is that Solarez gloss resin is less than $30 per quart, which makes it very cost effective.

I occasionally still use prop (still got a little in the garage) on a few balsa bass baits and it seems to hold up OK. The catch is you need a very thin solution of prop to dip baits (otherwise you get drips and sheets), so it requires at least 5 and as many as 10 dips, with some drying time between dips to build up a coating that is optimal, then allowing the coating to dry further overnight to become really hard. So to me, prop seems sort of "old school" and there are other products that are just as good and faster to use. I use Devcon Two Ton epoxy, which cures faster than Etex. And as noted above, UV cured polyester is very quick to use and provides protection that is as good.

I think TU reports about results with plastic substitutes for propionate have been very uneven. Cracking when dried, inability to get it dissolved, etc. So that's a crap shoot and there are several undercoating alternatives that have proven less troublesome. I first bought prop from Swede, a TU member who unfortunately passed away a few years ago, then from a TU member in South Carolina whose name I dis-remember. Apparently there can be several versions of propionate and I think the one used by lure builders is cellulose propionate. A Google search shows quite a few sources, although it may be hard to source clear pellets. Nowadays, I use either epoxy or UV cured polyester resin for undercoating. I tried the latter (Solarez) for topcoating but didn't like it; however it works fine for undercoating and is a fast and easy alternative to multiple (5- dips in propionate dissolved in acetone. Brush it on, rotate it for a couple of minutes while it levels out, then expose it to sunlight for 10-15 minutes and you're ready to go. I know "sunlight" might be a problem in Scotland but mine has cured just as well on cloudy days because there is always UV from the sun penetrating to Earth regardless of the weather. The cure process is not temperature sensitive.

Tommy Biffle makes bottom contact with it and then slowly reels so it has at least occasional bottom contact. Really, I think you can fish them any way you'd fish a regular football head jig, which they basically are. Look up "Biffle Bug" to see what plastic he uses - it's a fairly modest size creature bait, so there are lots of alternatives. There are also lots of knock-off 'swing jigs' now on the market.