BobP

Pledge takes an hour or two to dry. Like other acrylic coatings, I'd hit it with a hair dryer to make sure it's bone dry before topcoating. AC1315 is a topcoat new to most TUers so there may be something in your detailed finishing process that is causing the problem vice the acrylic paint. I don't want any solvent based topcoat to remain in a liquid state on top of fragile acrylic paint any longer than necessary. The best way to prevent that is simply to dip it and hang it so any excess quickly drips off the tail of the bait. From prior posts, I read that the solvent in AC1315 is Xylene, which is a pretty "active" solvent.

If you build wood lures, heating brings the chance that it will expand the air in the wood and cause a bubble in your finish. Been there, done that. It's one reason I pay lots of attention to the undercoat I put on lures to make sure it's durable and has complete coverage so it can withstand a little heating when I use a hair dryer on the paint as I apply it. Once you get a bubble, it's almost impossible to make it disappear. You can't really talk about one finish step or one choice in finish product without considering all of them together and the specific procedures you use in applying them. D2T is the fastest curing 30 minute epoxy I've tried and will give you excellent results if you measure and mix it really well. To me, more steps in a finish process = more chances for something to go wrong, so it pays to keep it as simple as possible.

Heat is the only thing that speeds epoxy cure and you need to rotate the baits while they are being heated or the epoxy will drip and sag. Since D2T only takes about 5 hours to become hard enough to lightly handle, i've never felt the need to acclerate. Its cure. But guys who do say that putting the lures in a box with a hundred watt light buld (are those still sold?) while under rotation can half that time. To me, it just makes more sense to let it cure at room temps. The more "tricks" you try in lure building, the more likely you are to screw it up.

Generally, lip angles of about 45 degrees give a good combination of dive and action. More than 45 degrees begins to give you more action but less dive depth. Less than 45 degrees gives you more depth but less action. Many elements go into a lip - shape, width, length, and angle of lip. How much action you want on a big swimbait depends on its shape, segment lengths, weight distribution, overall mass, etc and how the lip integrates it all into the action you want. So it requires experimentation to get what you want most times.

I often sand down a rod blank to raw graphite when reconfiguring a rod, either to just remove what I consider "non-functional" heavy finish to lighten up the blank, or to hide where I took off the old guides. I never re-coat them with rod finish. I have 5-6 rods like this that I've used for a decade and have never had a blank failure. Rod blanks are very tough and they get sanded at the factory before they add finish anyway.

I think cutting off tip material is a big crap shoot because different blanks have different "tapers" and you won't know about yours until you have the blank in your hands. And if you do it, how much tip do you remove? You won't know how the rod fishes until it is completed with the handle and all the guides attached. The recommended procedure is to buy a 6' MH blank that has the action and power you want and shorten it from the butt. A Dremel with a fiber reinforced cutoff wheel does a neat job of cutting blanks.

While there are lots of new rod guide designs, I stick with the tried-and-true Fuji guides. Either the Fuji Hardloy or the Alconite ceramic ring material does fine with any type of line, including braid. My personal favorite is the Alconite, which is the lighter material and a bit harder than the Hardloy or Aluminum Oxide but is still sold at a reasonable price point. Braid will not affect the ceramic. If you fish braid with a fluoro leader, you might want to go with a tip top guide that has a 8mm ring size. Lots of factory and custom rods come with 6mm rings. They work OK with braid/fluoro using an Alberto knot but upsizing to an 8 mm ring helps pass the knot in my experience.

The Mylar foils are great if you want a chrome or mirror effect. But usually I prefer the softer metallic shine of aluminum, which more resembles fish scales.

Plenty of musky lure builders use screw eyes in their baits versus thru-wiring as long as they are working with a harder wood. On the question of what material to use for the body, I recommend looking at a wood density chart before selecting a wood species. The lighter the wood you use, the more natural buoyancy and action your bait will have. Oak is very dense at 47 lbs/cu ft average. Poplar is almost half that density.

Looking around, I checked out Jones Tones, another supplier of art foils used by some builders. They announced that they have discontinued their line of foils. So... it looks like the universe of thin foils for crankbaits is narrowing significantly. 3M makes some adhesive foils but they are 3 and 5 mm thick. The 3 mm foil is about 5X the thickness of heavy duty aluminum foil, so I'm doubtful of its usefulness. All I can think of now is to use the aluminum duct tape foil, which I have used in the past and is readily available at home centers. But I hate that it is so thick and has a thick adhesive backing too. Damn!

I wasn't satisfied with the Britebak "gold" foil I got a few years ago. It was obviously a brass color, not gold, and it corroded and turned dark brown in spots on the lures I tried it on. I thought Venture had pulled it from their offerings but might be wrong. After the failure, I used the silver foil and over-sprayed it with some transparent yellow, which looks fine.

Hmm, the rolls of silver foil reflective tape are still listed in the Venture catalog but I can't find any suppliers that have it in stock via Google either. Bummer!

boisarc, I think you nailed it on the mechanism of wrinkling. The basic remedy is that you want to prevent MCU from pooling anywhere on the surface of a bait before it has hardened and out-gassed most of its solvents. I've been using MCU several years. Storage problems, yes. Application problems, none. I don't use any solvent based coating underneath the MCU and I make sure the acrylic paint is dried with a hair dryer as I paint the bait. Hang the bait to dry to allow all excess MCU to drip off the tail. Voila - a no muss, no fuss topcoat that looks great on a bass bait and is very durable in a single coat. Ready to fish in a few days after the MCU has cross-linked. It has worked in my garage in any humidity, at temperatures from 45 to 85 F. Are there other good topcoats? Yes! I also regularly use Devcon Two Ton, which is my gold standard for a reliable esthetic appearance. I have Solarez UV cured polyester resin on hand if I want to use it. Do solvent based concrete sealers work? Obviously yes but I feel I have enough choices on hand and I'm leery of the need to use multiple dips and weeks-long cure times. There are lots of topcoat choices these days. All of them work to some degree. You just need to gain experience with the one you choose and work out the "gotchas" that are inherent in all of them.

Isn't that enough reason? The topcoat helps keep the paint on the lure. If you don't care whether it stays on or not, don't bother topcoating it.

I use brushes for a couple of years and clean them thoroughly in lacquer thinner. They eventually build up hardened epoxy at the base of the bristles and become less flexible, at which point I throw them away, but they last a long time. A nylon bristle artist brush only costs a few bucks.

Just about every blank retailer carries a version of lipless bait. But if you really want something to mimic the action of a Red Eye Shad, you need to buy one and repaint it. I don't use lipless baits enough to discriminate much among brands but I think it depends on the exact action you want. Red Eyes are advertised to shimmy while they drop through the water column on a slack line. At least that's what KVD says! Other guys want a bait that will come to rest on the bottom in a upright position. Maybe your preference depends on how you like to fish them.

I don't use a percentage amount of denatured alcohol either - I just add a few drops and mix it into the epoxy until I get the thickness I want. JMHO, you don't want the epoxy to be too thin, just a little thinner so it will brush out better and help expel air bubbles. I'm sure it's much less than 10%.

Sanding sealer is something to fill in the grain on wood before you begin to apply finish so the grain will not raise when hit by paint. Most sealers are not formulated to be tough, but to be rather soft and easily sanded. To me, that's insufficient for wood crankbaits because I want something durable as well as waterproof. For saltwater use, especially for baits for trolling, I use Devcon epoxy as both an undercoat and a topcoat. I like Devcon because it is a thick topcoat that will resist hook rash longer than most. It is also non-reactive with just about any other kind of coating, solvent or water based. Devcon Two Ton undercoat Lightly sand to remove gloss for better paint adhesion Color basecoat of acrylic paint (usually Polytranspar Superhide White for me) Paint using any acrylic paint Devcon topcoat I've substituted Solarez for an epoxy undercoat, one or two coats, with good results on bass baits. I don't care for its low gloss as a topcoat but I wouldn't hesitate to use it in single or multiple coats if you like the results. To me, it seems as durable as epoxy. You can substitute a lacquer based color basecoat and paint if desired. I agree with Musky Glenn about the philosophy of multiple steps - the more you do to a bait, the more chance you have to screw it up. One ??? Why undercoat a bait that doesn't have the hardware already installed? It seems a lot simpler to install the hardware first, then begin the steps required for the finish, including the undercoating. The only thing I hold to the end is installing lips, which I do before the final topcoat.

www.taxidermy.net is a gateway to a variety of paint suppliers. Many of them sell their colors as both lacquers and water based acrylics.

If it's like the Glonation paint I've got, the glow grains in the paint are way too large to pass through an airbrush. If yours has smaller grains, the paint is water based and can be thinned with water or any water based acrylic thinner product.

You might try a latex cover just for your thumb, called a "finger cot". But I second Ben's suggestion to put some super glue on it. I use that in the winter when I have skin splits on my fingers and it works very well.

I decanted a quart of MCU into 2 Mason jars with rubber seal lids and used Bloxygen, using one jar for dipping crankbaits. Previously, I used salsa jars with constricted necks and the storage results were about the same. The dipping jar lasted about 5 months before it began to harden and the unopened storage jar followed in another 2 months. I really like dipping lures in MCU but the next time I get some, I'll try the "tap the can" method of storage. Several guys report that their MCU remains liquid for the entire can with this method. I'll have to brush it on but saving $25 worth of otherwise wasted MCU is preferable. BTW, polycarbonate (aka Lexan) lips do not form a good bond with MCU, so it tends to separate from the lip after awhile, leaving a flap of loose MCU attached to the nose of a wood bait. You can remove the flap with a razor blade. Not a biggie but it's an esthetic fault that brushing it could avoid. No problem coating plastic lips or circuit board lips. It bonds just fine to those.

Matt, for me, the Garco and Famowood began to harden in the storage containers even FASTER than DN. I got the Famowood years ago before I became "educated" on storing MCU. I got the Garco last year and tried to preserve it with a wine preservative containing CO2 and Nitrogen, which obviously didn't work out very well - it began to turn to a gel state within a month of receipt. So my experience was hardly scientifically rigorous, but I still think the DN lasts longer maybe because it its thinner and contains more solvent than the others.

Depends on what clearcoat you use and its viscosity. I don't recommend epoxy for spoons because the sharp edges of a spoon will shed epoxy very quickly. When I dip clearcoat spoons I use Dick Nite MCU, which is designed specifically for that application. If a hole gets filled, I simply zip it out with a small drill bit and my Dremel tool.

I've tried Dick Nite, Garco, and Famowood MCU and the DN is significantly thinner than the others. Viscosity may be significant to paint wrinkling because MCUs contain strong solvents that can wrinkle acrylic paint if left wet on the surface for too long. And a thicker coating of MCU takes longer for its solvent to flash off. So the lesson may be to use some kind of protective coating over acrylic paint if you go with a thicker MCU like Garco or Famowood.