BobP

I don't try to avoid brushing epoxy on the hook hangers or line tie. I just use a Dremel with a 1 mm drill bit to zip it out after the epoxy is cured hard.

Sisson built a lot of his brand baits with jelutong wood, and that one looks like it to me. It's about 50% heavier than cedar and has almost no visible grain, unlike cedar. I'd consider drilling a belly hanger hole and putting in a ballast/belly hanger. The problem may be that jelutong is quite dense at 28 lbs/sq ft, so it won't take much ballast to make the bait a sinker. I'd try 2 grams of ballast max.

I'd sand the lip slot to remove any loose glue or wood and then pack it with a paste epoxy like Rod Bond, which is a waterproof 4000 psi epoxy. Push in the new lip, wipe off the sqeeze-out, and hang the bait by its belly hanger overnight. The nice thing about Rod Bond is it gives you time to adjust the lip before it begins to set. I mount lips in batches of 5-6 baits at a time and the Rod Bond lets me tweak the lip positions for more than an hour, so it's not a panic operation. 5 minute epoxy works OK but it is a liquid so can leak out - plus, it turns an ugly brown after exposure to UV light for awhile. Just finished a batch of baits that look very similar to your wounded war hero - flat sided shallow runners based on the "little Petey", "Little PT Shad", "Dinky-Donker" pattern baits.

An epoxied belly hanger/ballast won't pull out of a cedar body. If you want a little extra insurance, roll the belly weight between 2 bastard files to rough up its surface and increase the adhesion. As far as the epoxy goes, I've used 30 minute epoxy, 5 minute epoxy, paste epoxy, and epoxy putty logs to install belly weights and have never had one pull out over hundreds of crankbaits.

Predator is one of the few sources that has a mold factory make copies from actual popular baits like the original Wiggle Wart. He pays attention to the ballasting and internals as well as the exterior look, which is critical to performance and something that's sadly lacking in many plastic KO's. Due to the differences in plastic composition, shell thickness, etc, you still may not get a perfect copy of a popular original bait but he obviously wants to offer crankbaits that work right, not just look right. And that makes a big difference to end users. I've ordered a few of his recently offered baits and was happy with them. There was a series of posts about his Wiggle Warts that you might check out via the search function.

Lurepartsonline has always given good service to me. However, you can't really expect a company like that to take every Chinese KO blank out for a test before they list it on their web site. Some of the smaller guys like Predator and Bustin Bass do that, so I tend to have a little more confidence in the performance of their unpainted blanks. That doesn't mean that you can't get dud baits from any online source. But to my knowledge, all of the above sources make good on their stuff and want to keep their customers happy.

On balsa crankbaits, I prefer either 30 minute epoxy like Devcon Two Ton, UV cured polyester resin like Solarez, or 6-8 dips into a propionate/acetone solution. Smearing on some liquid superglue will harden the balsa surface before undercoating, if you want it even harder. I almost always use Devcon to topcoat balsa crankbaits, so using it for undercoating is an easy choice and keeps things simple. Apply it in a standard thick coating and then sand it lightly to remove the gloss and improve adhesion of the paint. I typically mix in a few drops of denatured alcohol into the mixed epoxy for both tasks. It extends the brush time by a minute, helps leveling and expelling bubbles, and does not extend the final cure time appreciably. Balsa is pretty fragile and compressible, so a thicker waterproof finish with 2 epoxy layers makes the crankbait much more durable. If you have Solarez on hand, I think it yields a coating similar in thickness and toughness to epoxy and it is much faster since it cures in a few minutes with UV light. But I don't like its milky semigloss appearance as a topcoat. You can choose any of a dozen coatings for both undercoating and topcoating and they'll all work. I think I've tried almost all of them and keep coming back to epoxy for good reasons. Your mileage may vary!

It's like a lot of things - there are very good unpainted baits (KO's), some not so good, and some are terrible. You just have to try some and pick out the ones that work for you. Sellers like Predator, Bustin Bass Baits, and Dakota Tackle work to acquire better baits from overseas suppliers and the general quality of KO's has gotten better in the last few years. But if you want an actual unpainted version of a popular bait like a Megabass Ito Vision 110, you won't find one anywhere. Megabass Japan doesn't sell unpainted baits. The KO may be a good bait in its own right, but it won't be a Megabass. So if you want to paint a bait that's a "real whatever" you'll have to buy a real whatever and repaint it. A lot of guys on TU repaint KO's and if you have a specific lure type in mind, you can ask in the forum for advice and will probably receive good guidance.

Crankbaits are very sensitive about exactly where you put the line tie. It helps me to closely copy a good commercial bait for the first iteration, then experiment from there to tweak the performance to my liking in subsequent baits. On a deep diver, the closer the line tie is to the nose of the bait, the harder/wider action you get. If it's too close, it may run OK at slow speed but blow out at higher speeds. If you use soft temper stainless steel wire for the line tie, you can bend it forward/back to alter the action of the bait to some extent. On baits with the tie in the nose, the closer the tie is to the surface of the lip, the harder/wider the action - so you can bend the tie up/down for a similar tweak. In my experience, deep divers are the most difficult to design because there are critical elements including fore/aft balance, lip shape and size, line tie placement, and ballast location that all have to work together for a good running bait. All of these things are important to all baits but it just seems that a deep diver with one element that is "off" will show bad behavior faster than the same fault on a shallow running bait.

Just like plastic baits, crankbaits are fishing tools. If you aren't prepared to throw them where bass live, no matter how much that Japanese bait costs or how long it took you to build that custom bait, you aren't using them to their full capability and so shame on you. To soften the disappointment of losing a bait, I build mine in small batches of 3-5 baits. After you build a few hundred baits, a loss becomes less heart wrenching!

Mumpy, most hobby crankbait builders use water based acrylic airbrush paint and cover it with a durable waterproof topcoat like epoxy, moisture cured urethane, etc Createx is the largest supplier of airbrush paint you'll see in craft stores but there are alternative brands available through online art stores that carry airbrush supplies. The alternative to water based acrylics is lacquer based airbrush paint, which requires more breathing protection.

Top Dawg, I think you'll find that if you just hang the baits up to dry/cure after dipping them, your bubbling problem will disappear. When you put the baits on a lure turner, it allows the MCU to pool in areas of the bait under the developing skin - which allows wet MCU to sit on the paint for too long, thus causing bubbles.

I agree, when you start whacking off pieces of rod tip you never really know what you're gonna get. I also think you should sell the rod, which should go for a good price, and buy something that suits you better.

A jerkbait should wiggle when retrieved. If I had a batch that didn't, I'd ask for a refund and send them back.

I see the "subscribe or else" popup is back. That's it for me - Over and out! SLT et al - maybe it's benign to ask for the email address, maybe not. A lot of folks won't tolerate that behavior - including me. Trusting sites on the internet is dead dead dead.

Mark, glad you found some comfort. For me, lazy rules. I do all my shaping/sanding while sitting in a lawn chair in the garage, using hand tools, with a small trash can between my knees to catch the dust.

SLT785 - Thanks for the link without the forced join-up. I found the site interesting, especially for pike/musky guys. p.s. - why does the TU site insist on "auto correcting" the phrase popup (when used with a hyphen befure "up) to Plaster of Paris?

The first order of balsa I made as a neophyte builder was super light competition balsa (6-8 lb sq ft). I made baits from that batch for years and never had one destroyed by a bass or a medium sized pike. I don't think there are any rules about making crankbaits - just do whatever necessary to get a bait that is as durable as you want it to be - whatever that means. Personally, I've given up thru-wiring balsa baits. Instead, I split a soft balsa bait in half and lay in hand-wound soft stainless wire hardware, then use epoxy to join the halves, undercoat and topcoat the bait. On fat bodied soft balsa baits, I've sometimes just drilled longer holes and epoxied in the wire hangers/line ties without problems. I wouldn't use concrete sealer to both prime and topcoat a balsa bait but would try it as a topcoat on a bait that had an epoxy undercoating. As far as Behr goes, you need to do a little research to see if it contains enough solids in comparison to the AC1315 or other concrete sealers, to be a good topcoat product. I got some AC1315, which contains 30% solids, and so far it seems promising as a topcoat for hard plastic lures, but for balsa I'm less convinced - it's early days yet. Use a solvent based concrete sealer, not water-based.

I assume you are foiling the sides of the bait and not onto the shoulders or the belly, which are usually painted and not foiled anyway. I have always used self-adhesive foil like Brite-Bak silver foil designed for stained glass artists. But I hear they are no longer making it. An adhesive foil is much easier to smooth out and to apply scale effect after application BUT your basic problem is you're trying to apply pre-scaled foil on a bait without flat sides. I just don't think there's any way to do that without burnishing out the scale effect.

On the first page, it asks me to subscribe to the site. There was no option. Subscribe or don't see the mag. I don't think it's reasonable to force visitors to subscribe before they can browse the mag to see if it's of interest to them. So sayonara mag!

Juice, It was a "Duh" moment when I read of simply flipping the jar upside down. Great suggestion! As to Dick Nite topcoats, there have been at least 3 that I know of - but only one is a MCU. One is a water based urethane which several members tested. My test showed water absorption. turning white, and peeling after submersion in water for a few hours, so it did not measure up to MCU in any way. Can't remember what the third DN topcoat was/is.