BobP

I started out with a cheap Chinese 30 psi max airbrush compressor, moved up to a more expensive Badger airbrush compressor, and most recently to a Porter Cable 135 psi 6 gallon model. As you move up to compressors with higher pressure and more air storage, you get spoiled because they provide a steadier air stream to your airbrush and run less often. During an afternoon of painting, my 6 gal compressor might run once after initially airing up. When it does, I take a short break because the noise is quite loud. It fits handily under the workbench in my garage and it's nice to have it for other tasks like filling tires or using a nail gun. The Porter Cable Jet Stream looks to be an identical older model of my compressor. Porter Cable has a rep for high quality so count yourself lucky.

You can buy a moisture trap at home centers along with any hose adapter fittings you'll need. As far as the compressor, you have to judge for yourself how well it works for you. Most guys like to shoot paint at between 20-35 psi sustained pressure. Small airbrush compressors tend to have a sustained pressure output that is 10-15 psi less than their advertised max pressure. Sustained pressure is what you are actually spraying paint with soon after you press the airbrush trigger. Paint is up to you. Many guys start out with cheap $2 hobby paint from the craft store. It works but most of us switch to Createx or other brands of airbrush paint after fighting with the hobby paints for awhile. Hobby paint always has to be thinned and it has large pigment particles that will clog your airbrush more often. Airbrush paint has finely ground pigment and additives to make the paint flow through an airbrush better. Even at 2-3 times the price, it's worth it to most of us. Besides, you'll be surprised at how long a 2 or 4 oz bottle of airbrush paint will last - you use tiny amounts of it at a time.

I got a few of the Spro Little John knockoffs recently. The plastic bodies seem internally and externally the same as the Little John I have except for the shifting ball bearing which is steel in the knockoff and rubber coated metal in the factory model. I painted one in a ghost pattern with minimal paint and MCU topcoat - it barely floats in cold water with just 1/4" of the end of the tail sticking above the surface, fitted with #1 split rings and #6 Gamakatsu Round Bend trebles. Bottom line, if you want a floating lure you'll need to pay close attention to the weight of finish and added hardware unless you want to drill out some of the nose ballast. Otherwise, if you like the originals, you'll probably like these baits too. They're relatively heavy for such a small 2" bait and should cast like a bullet, plus #6 trebles will not tangle or catch on the lip - all good attributes.

A little off topic, but I had the same opinion of the new Scatter Rap Shad as Mark did - my 2 cranks work only at slow retrieve speeds. A useful "hunting" crankbait should work at any speed, including warp 8. IMO, many crankbait fishermen tend to retrieve too slowly to get bass (especially largemouth) to react to the lure. If a bass has time to closely examine a crankbait, as often as not they'll give it a pass. Speed and stained water promote crankbait bites. Never say never - if you fish long enough you'll catch fish with a crankbait in crystal clear water with a slow retrieve (especially in very cold water), but as a general principle, I think it's true. Jaw, I think you're finding out that medium and deep diving baits are different - and harder to get to run correctly because there are more variables to juggle than just the length of the lip. Most of us went through the same experience and had (and still have!) the same failures as you.

I usually cast it into 2-10 ft of water and let it sink halfway to the bottom before giving it a gentle lift, which causes a little wiggle like a struggling shad. You almost always get bit on the original drop or during the first lift. If not, I feel like they're not there. I've never had luck yo-yo-ing more than once or twice. It's a quiet finesse presentation so it depends on the fish seeing the bait.

There's no such thing as having too powerful a compressor, or one with too much air storage capacity - as long as it has an air valve that can reduce the pressure to that recommended for your airbrush. I run a 135 psi 6 gallon compressor and dial it down to 20-45 psi for painting. The higher the pressure it will develop and the bigger the tank, the longer you can paint before the compressor turns on again to air up. I think Iwata calls for a max pressure of 45 or 50 psi. At some point, I assume over-pressure could damage the air valve in the airbrush. But in practical terms, you'll never need to shoot anything at more than max pressure through an Iwata anyway, so it's sort of academic.

I don't think you have to use a Rogue but I wouldn't use a $25 Megabass when a $5 Rogue will do just as well. You probably also want to avoid jerkbaits that have weight shifting ballasts because that can make the weight distribution unpredictable since you're moving the ballast rearward. This isn't a presentation where you want long casts to cover lots of water, so shifting ballast isn't really an issue anyway. I used Gamma brand adhesive lead tennis racquet tape half way between the belly hanger and the tail. It's thin and you can burnish its edges so that it disappears when you repaint the lure. I just added tape until the bait would slowly sink backward tail-first in a bucket of water, then repainted in a very simple white shad pattern with light gray back.

Stephen, Most jerkbait fishermen want a suspending bait to pause with a head-down attitude but one jerkbait mod that works is something I picked up from a guy named Crankenstein who posted it on another site years ago. He had a big tank filled with bass which he fed with live threadfin shad and he observed how the shad would start to struggle and sink tail-first as they began to die. As soon as the bass saw that, the shad would immediately be eaten. So he weighted a Smithwick Suspending Rogue to have the same action. I tried this mod and it works really well; throw the Dying Shad in, let it sink slowly tail first, lift it slowly so it seems to struggle a little. This seems almost irresistible to bass and works best in cool water but also in summertime as a finesse presentation. Shad die for various reasons year-round. I've had the Dying Shad pull big bass out of lay-down trees and bite 5 ft from the boat, and that made me a believer. It also made me think that the "bait must always perfectly suspend" rule shouldn't be followed so narrowly.

It's difficult to trim a lip on a crankbait to fix its action but yep, the worst that can happen is it won't work anyway so you really have nothing to lose. I also think the lip on the green bait is too long to have the line tine in the nose of the bait. Can't tell as easily on the other bait. I haven't had great luck trimming the lips on crankbaits that don't work right. It isn't always the lip that's the problem; sometimes it's the lip angle, sometimes it's the body shape or the position or amount of ballast. You don't know until you examine it closely as it runs and then make changes to see how they work. It's just part of prototyping a new bait and once you get it nailed, you can make new baits with confidence that they'll perform - if you take good notes and measurements.

Fishnart, we're just talking about the little tricks to get the best results from Solarez, as with any topcoat. There are a bunch of other tricks that apply to epoxy. Which is easier? I gotta say Solarez and it's also super fast since you can go from bare paint to ready-to-fish lure in 5-30 minutes, depending on how you cure it. No measuring, no mixing, no worry about it setting up too fast to brush, no waiting 24 hrs to harden, and hopefully no yellowing. But in the final analysis, all these topcoats we talk about will be judged on how they make a lure look and for how long.

There's a point of diminishing returns if you want to keep your sanity with suspending jerkbaits. LC Staysees come in 3 versions, slow floating V1, suspending V2, and slow sinking V3. I catch bass on all versions and the sinking V3 model is becoming a favorite of mine. That suggests maybe I was getting a little overwrought about suspending jerkbaits. Unless you pause jerkbaits for very long periods between twitches, I'm not sure it matters that much. BTW, not only do you have to worry about the jerkbait's buoyancy in various water temps, you also have to factor in the type (braid, mono, fluoro) and diameter of line you throw it on as well as whether you connect to the bait with a split ring, clip, etc. Really the only solution if you want one to suspend is to use a slow floating jerkbait and add weight to it when you get on the water that day.

BTW, something I noticed today about Solarez. If you pop the top of the jug and look inside, you'll see a bunch of very small wax flakes floating on top. The flakes rise to the surface in the jug and they do the same thing when you apply Solarez to a lure; in fact they are necessary for it to cure hard. They also cause the cured finish to have a satin versus a gloss finish. If you want a higher gloss finish, stir the Solarez up before applying it. You'll get fewer wax flakes and correspondingly higher gloss. There will still be enough wax to suffocate the chemical reaction and make for a hard slick finish.

I've sealed a few wood baits with Solarez, then painted and topcoated with Solarez - no problems. How it stacks up as a sealer under solvent based topcoats like MCU or concrete sealers, etc is TBD in my book. It takes awhile for the community to try, adopt, and then report their collective experience with a product. Personally, I've never had a problem topcoating ANY paint/sealer with epoxy because the stuff seems chemically inert.

I have one Suddeth foam bait left from years ago. I liked them and they had some unique designs that caught fish. Suddeth would ask whether you wanted the bait to float, suspend, or sink when you ordered one. The negative aspect was if you decided to repaint one, you had to deal with the many air voids in the surface of the foam if you decided to take the original finish off. I agree that Blackjack at Nomad baits turns out a superior crankbait. Don't know whether Nomad is currently active. I visited the site and it appears to have been inactive for quite awhile. Social Cranker, know all this has not definitively answered your question but if Skeeter doesn't know, probably no one does!

I guess we've become accustomed to seeing high gloss crankbaits but after topcoating a few cranks with Solarez, I decided satin gloss is OK. At least, OK enough that I'm not gonna start buffing baits with auto wax. I had a miserable time trying to dip baits in Solarez - runs, sheeting, and white haze where the wax migrated to the tail of the baits when I hung them up to drip off the excess finish. What worked for me is to brush it on, then put the baits on a rotator for a few minutes to level out the finish and allow the wax to come to the surface of the topcoat. Then I either cure them in a nail salon UV light or just sit the rotator outside to cure while it's still running. I'm a patient guy but the thought of applying concrete sealer and waiting weeks for it to cure hard is beyond me.

The top bait looks like a Little Petey crankbait. There are several Tennessee builders that sell baits that look like it, some with similar names, so it's impossible to be sure unless you can identify it by the color scheme details. Flat Shads by Sonny McFarland, Tennessee Tuffy baits build one similar, or check the following: http://www.safetyexpressusa.com/index.html Quote: The Original “Little Petey�? was made famous by tournament fisherman on the lakes and rivers of East Tennessee. Fishing tournaments have been won with The Original “Little Petey�? on Watts Bar, Fort Loudon, Tellico, Chickamauga, Cherokee, Douglas, Norris and Melton Hill Lakes and the Tennessee, Clinch, Emory and Holston Rivers. For over 45 years Pete Reynolds and his son Tony have been hand crafting the balsa wood flat sided crank bait in Rockwood, Tennessee. During this time The Original “Little Petey�? has been tournament tested and proven all across the country. From Vermont to Washington State to Texas to Virginia and all over the South East the success of The Original “Little Petey�? has become legendary. That is why The Original “Little Petey�? has been copied by so many but never duplicated! The second bait I've seen before but can't remember where. Both may have been made by the same shop because of the similarities in the paint schemes. It does resemble a Suddeth design but it looks like a wood bait to me and the Suddeths I've seen (and bought) were made from expanded foam by a small shop in Georgia that was sold sometime back. Don't know if they're still being sold by the new owner.

I looked at the Kirjes sander and it seems similar to the Foredom tool I got a couple of years ago - which is basically a more powerful Dremel type rotary tool that accepts bits up to 1/4" shank diameter and employs a flexible shaft and hand piece. I have a 1" diameter 4" long soft rubber sanding drum on the Foredom that makes quick work of shaping-sanding tasks but for smaller crankbaits, I still use a smaller Dremel sander because it offers a bit more hand control. One nice feature on the Foredom is you can run the tool in forward or reverse and vary the speed via a foot control switch, so you can shoot the sawdust plume it creates away from you. I'm thinking what Aydensdad82 is looking for is a tool or jig that rounds both sides of a lure simultaneously to a defined profile. You have 2 choices - either a cutting tool or a sanding tool. I would prefer sanding because it's safer unless you have a method of holding a small crankbait securely away from your fingers while cutting. That said, I still do it by hand with a Murphy knife to cut facets on the shoulder of the lure and a rotary sander to blend the facets smoothly into the body shape. You can get a nice symmetrical body this way IF you measure and mark the facets before you start cutting. I use a drafting compass to do that. It ends up being a lot of detail work to mark, cut, and sand the body shape but I just consider it part of the work needed to make a good crankbait with the tools I have available. If I built more than a hundred crankbaits a year, I'd be looking for faster, more exact methods. Since it's a hobby, that would only spur me to make even MORE crankbaits than the surplus already crammed into 10 plastic 3700 boxes in the garage - the shame of a crankbait building habit!

X2. I don't really see a way of doing it except with jig - or going after it "freehand".

I think you'll be disappointed with the Dremel router table and with trying to use their router bits for rounding baits. There are no Dremel router bits that have a large enough cut diameter to do any significant rounding over. The ones available are small (1/8"?) for light duty work. Their routing table is mostly plastic and it doesn't seem designed for precision cutting. I love my Dremel and use it extensively in building baits but the router accessory just didn't cut it for me. One neat idea I've seen for rounding over baits is to use pulley wheels mounted on a bench grinder with sandpaper glued inside the pulley's grooves to determine the bait's rounding profile. Might scuff up a finger if you aren't careful but it won't take one off.

"Different gets bit" is an old adage that is certainly true in bass fishing. I haven't used glow paint on crankbaits like Mark has but can testify to its productivity on jigging spoons that I fish in dark 40+ ft deep water in the fall and winter. Boats tend to congregate in one area during a jigging spoon bite and most guys throw chrome spoons. It's nice to still be boating fish long after most of the boats have given up in frustration. I think glow paint works better the deeper your bait is presented. Don't think it would be as effective on a KVD 1.5 as it would be on a DT-16 or 20. JMHO

Spurk, That also bothers me. I find it irritating to open a storage box and have a stink waft out. I first noticed it it when I tried using spray-on auto primers, so I dropped that immediately. Unfortunately, it didn't help much to over-coat baits with epoxy. When the storage box gets warm, the smell seems to escape anyway. I don't know if it affects the attracting quality of a crankbait when you're fishing it but it seems like something to avoid if possible.

You need to consult a CPA. Do you have to pay tax on profits, after deducting business expenses? Yes, if there are any! Could you ignore it all and try to fly below the radar? Hmm.. Most tax audits are triggered by specific "red flag" circumstances or when their computers spit out a prospective benefit (taxes owed) big enough to justify their cost of going after it. Of course, there's also the dreaded "random audit". But they're getting pretty rare.

There's typically lots of vegetation in Florida lakes, so try lures that work well in that kind of cover, like texas rigged worms, spinnerbaits, or topwater lures. The classic color for plastics in Florida is Junebug and other shades of blue. Blue is classic but the biggest fish I ever caught (10+ lbs) was on a 6" Zoom watermelon worm out of a golf course irrigation pond.

If you have a sporting goods store nearby that carries steel leader wire for saltwater use, it is semi-tempered and comes in various test strengths. Malin is a popular brand. JMHO, guys tend to use wire sizes that are over-kill even for big fish. Malin 12 gauge leader wire is rated for 190 lbs and is pretty thin. Do you think a musky could apply 190 lbs of force? Way before that happened, all the guides would be torn off your rod.

One thing you might try is enclosing the ball in a piece of drinking straw or other type of tube so it will slide back and forth easier. It's bad if your ball gets glued somewhere in the channel.