BobP

When you're talking about flotation and water density, the physics are confusing and I think Skeeter mixed it up here. Water is less dense at higher temperatures because the molecules are moving with more energy and spread apart more. Less dense water exerts less buoyant force, and vise-versa. In other words, colder water exerts more buoyant force on a crankbait and warmer water exerts less buoyant force. If your bait suspends in 45 degree water, it will sink in 80 degree water. Those of us who fish suspending jerkbaits get schooled in this. I don't think this has great effect on the rise rates of most floating crankbaits because they are buoyant enough that the difference in rise rate is negligible. I'm no physicist but I know how to Google and it appears that water pressure has no effect on buoyancy unless it is great enough to compress the volume of the object. So the U.S. Thresher was almost as buoyant at 1000 ft as it was on the surface. It was not until water pressure crushed the sub at 1500-2000 ft that it became less buoyant and sank.

Same here Skeeter. It's very informative to read some past posts, even though I'm pretty sure I caught them back in 2004. 9-10 yrs of added experience throws a different light on a lot of stuff!

Manufacturing crankbaits in volume like Rapala is different from hand building. I think most hand builders either split balsa bodies after shaping to insert a wire frame or start out with 2 pieces that are lightly glued together, cut out, shaped, then divided to insert the wire frame. Thru-wiring depends on the type of wood used for the crankbait. Hardwoods like basswood, cedar, and paulownia are hard enough to hold screw eyes so no thru-wiring is necessary. Many builders use thru-wiring on balsa baits because that wood is so soft that screw eyes holding in the soft wood is problematical. It's a matter of judgement though. Thru wiring makes for a stronger bait that is less prone to failure and so it maximizes durability in a hand built bait. Other builders feel that reinforcing the surface of a balsa bait and using epoxy to glue in screw eyes is sufficient for durability. Thru-wiring does require more time, effort, and expertise. In the end, it's player's choice.

There are many different blades for scroll saws but the only one I use for lures is the standard 12 tpi blade because it is stronger and less prone to break or bend while cutting hardwood. I use it cranked to maximum tension. By happenstance, it's kerf is also perfect for cutting the lip slot for a 1/32" thick circuit board lip in one pass. Scroll saws excel at cutting intricate ornamental patterns in 1/8" thick wood. If you are planning other projects that can use that, a scroll saw is best. I only use mine to cut the basic lure outlines and lip slots on lures. It takes patience but does a nice job. A smaller table top band saw would do that faster and just as well and would be more useful for other cutting chores. I hardly ever make more than 6 lures at a time and it's a hobby, not a business, so I'm content to stick with my scroll saw. If that sucker ever breaks down, I'll certainly replace it with a band saw though.

I have 4011 reducer and Pledge floor polish but it's very rare that I use them. Createx says that it MAY be thinned with water as much as 50%. If you thin it too much, the paint loses its ability to form a coherent film on the surface, beading up into colored water droplets. If I can shoot Createx at 35 psi, which I always can with my .3mm Iwata Revolution, I don't want to mess with thinning it. The real need for thinning comes when you want to paint a detail at low pressure, which might require the paint be thinned to spray well. Other than that, I blast away.

Yes, it's wire. Rapala minnow baits with balsa bodies use a through-wire technique in which a wire frame that includes the line tie and hook hangers is glued into the body, usually through a slot cut in the belly of the bait.

There's much better chance of vibration noise with a scroll saw since it has a reciprocating action. My variable speed Makita has done yeoman service for 12 yrs, so I have no complaints on that score. It cuts any thickness balsa just fine but it's slow going to cut 1/2" or thicker basswood or paulownia compared to a band saw. If I had it to do over, I'd most probably buy a band saw. But either will get the job done.

I think both a scroll and band saw are pretty quiet. I use a scroll saw exclusively and I'll say a couple of things about it: I lay the saw on a foam pad to stop any vibration getting to the table or wall. It will cut a finer line than band saws but it is much slower on hardwoods. I tried cutting Lexan and it was a pain, the blade wants to grab the material and lift it off the table because the upward stroke is non-cutting. Bottom line: if you want to cut hardwood, a band saw will do it much quicker. If all you cut is balsa or other soft woods, a scroll saw works just as well. As far as cutting lip materials, I use neither saw opting instead for cutting them out with metal snips followed by exact trimming with a Dremel sanding cylinder - it's just faster and more exact.

Transparent airbrush paint has the finest particles, in fact they may use dye instead of paint particles in many of the transparents - so there's nothing to clog the airbrush. If your airbrush has a tip clog and/or your paint is too grainy, it may be shooting mostly water and trapping the paint particles in the tip. If you're getting clogs along with the watery pearls on the bait, that's probably it. If no clogs, the paint is thinned too much. I never used anything but the fine tip with a Paasche VL so I don't think it's about the tip being too small. That leaves a few possibilities - maybe you need to keep the tip of your brush cleaner between colors or you need to step up the pressure. If that doesn't work, carefully check the tip parts and the needle to make sure nothing is bent, broken, or split. Lastly, it doesn't hurt to make sure you are using all he correct needle and tip parts together, if you Paasche came with 3 sets - they're easy to mix up. A Paasche VL is not the airbrush I use nowadays (mine's an Iwata Revolution but I've seen lots of lures beautifully done with them so I know it's possible.

Devcon is among the thickest epoxies. I never use more than one coat. 3S, epoxy has to be "brushed out" so every spot gets brushed consistently. I use a fine bristle artist's brush, Devcon thinned with a FEW drops of denatured alcohol. It can also get fisheyes if you are coating a bait with spots contaminated with oil. While curing, epoxy attracts epoxy and if there is an oil spot where epoxy is not adhering to the surface, the epoxy gets pulled away and causes a fisheye. I'm not especially careful when handling painted lures. The paint gets quite a bit of handling as I glue in the lips and I can't recall the last time I got a fisheye. Maybe the amount of natural oil in your fingers is a factor, I don't know.

Jurgo, to make consistent lips you need an accurate template. I use Powerdraw, a free CAD program. There's a small learning curve with the software but it makes it easy to get a perfectly symmetrical lip with a line tie hole dead center. A real advantage to Powerdraw is that it prints out the template in the correct size on a standard inkjet printer. I rough cut lips with a pair of aircraft metal snips, about $12 at Home Depot, leaving about a millimeter outside the template, then use a Dremel with a fine sanding cylinder to take the lip down to the exact template line. To finish, I polish the edges with a felt polishing cylinder on my Dremel. Not something I would do for $$ but it goes surprisingly fast, 10 minutes per lip. I don't use a large number of any lip design, so having a company laser cut or stamp cut lips is not an reasonable option - but one you might investigate.

Very nice post Dave! To the extent I know about hunters after building a thousand lures, I agree but think there may be other factors in addition to lip length that promote or inhibit hunting. They use Cray supercomputers to calculate hydrodynamics on submarines and crankbaits are just as complicated. Hunting is not something I try to build into all crankbaits due to the tuning and tweaking involved and hobby builders should be aware that even if a high percentage (80%?) of a batch of baits hunt, there will be some that never will and a few you will probably never be able to fish. The waste factor can be significant and very frustrating. In a practical sense, I think bouncing a crankbait off of cover and structure during the retrieve performs the same function as hunting.

I think epoxy looks great on a lure body but it always looks crappy on a clear diving lip, whichever brand and however you apply it. The only clearcoat I know that looks good on a lip is dipped Dick Nite S81 MCU. Sprayed auto clearcoat would also probably look good. I think it's just the nature of the beast. JMHO

Can't comment on travel rods. I use a 7 1/2' St Croix SCII Medium action/power saltwater popping rod converted from spinning to baitcasting for long distance crankbaiting. Whichever model you choose, steelhead rods have lots of bend and are designed for fishing rivers and streams with little if any vegetation. Such a rod will pretty much limit you to moving baits, which are fine for pike but less so for bass, which only bite moving baits when they're "in the mood". I'm not sure there's any perfect choice for shore fishing where you need to make long casts to pike and musky. I'd probably opt for a 8' MH fast action bass rod. The casts would be a little shorter but you'd stand a much better chance of actually landing hooked fish.

Yes, soft temper ss is easy to shape. I make line ties and hook hangers by twisting it into a "screw eye". When bent into a tight circle, it's surprisingly strong and I've never noticed any deformation of a line tie or hook hanger while bass fishing. However you choose to bend it, soft ss is a little stronger than soft brass, just slightly stiffer, and easy to bend. The only concession I make to soft wire is running a bead of epoxy along the wire on the bottom of the lip on deep diving baits where there is lots of distance between the line tie and the nose of the bait where the tie is anchors. Ease of tuning without cracking a lip or the finish on the nose of a bait is the reason soft wire is better but it's also much easier to make wire components accurately with it, too.

I have soft temper brass wire from McMaster-Carr. Is it too soft? depends on the diameter. I use .041", which is similar to the wire used in classic balsa baits. When twisted into a hook eye, my opinion is it's strong enough for bass baits. But I prefer using their soft temper stainless steel wire in the same size. Size for size, soft stainless is noticeably harder than soft brass wire but it is just as easy to shape. And it will not corrode. I think you can buy coils of 1/4" diameter lead for molding bullets - you might check with reloading suppliers.

I paint and clearcoat the parts of a swimbait separately and then glue in the hinge joints ( I use hand twisted screw eyes). Another thing - epoxy will thin out over sharp edges as it cures. If the swimbait has sharp edges at the joint and the body segments bang together during fishing, the epoxy will chip away the first time you fish it. So at least round over the edges of the body at the joint, or better yet frankly, consider a different clearcoat option.

A related issue: if your lip slot is perfectly square you will still end up with it canted unless you shape your bait symmetrically. I think that's what happens as often as a slot cutting error. I use a scroll saw to cut lip slots and a standard 12 tpi saw blade is the perfect width to cut a slot for a 1/32" circuit board lip in one pass. If you shape by hand as most of us do, you come to realize that every measurement and mark you can put on a lure to control your shaping and maintain its symmetry pays dividends. After a decade, I'm getting a little better at freehand shaping, but "a little better" is not nearly good enough to shape a crankbait body right.

I use a fine tipped calligraphy pen from Michael's craft store + black Createx paint. Cheap, lasts forever, and the paint won't run if hit with a solvent topcoat. A calligraphy pen is the same thing as a fountain pen, just without the ink reservoir. Dip the tip in paint or ink, write.

If the DN cured hard, maybe the paint underneath is thick and soft enough to be causing the effect. Or if the paint was solvent-based and not water based acrylic, that may cause problems. I found the DN to be the hardest and toughest topcoat I've tried. Its durability is only offset by the fact that it is thinner than some topcoats, like epoxy. I also think it is much slicker than epoxy so the bait tends to slide off obstructions and teeth a little easier.

I've had guys ask whether I could/would replace broken lips on their Rapala DT series baits. Nope - the work and materials involved are worth more than a new DT crankbait. That has not lessened my liking for fishing DT series baits however. To me, crankbaits are not to be considered immortal. Durable, yes, but idiot and/or wear proof no.

Mine always hardens within a couple of hours as the solvent off-gasses. Then it takes several days for the coating to moisture cure and get tough as nails. I have to ask - which Dick Nite topcoat are you using? I'm talking about the S-81 moisture cured urethane. If you're using another option, can't comment.

Well, you can't run an successful company without marketing products. If your products are lousy, market demand will fix the problem by reducing your sales until you fix the product or go out of business. IMO, Rapala puts out some of the best wood baits on the planet in a time when wood baits are becoming rare from large manufacturers. Look over the offerings from all manufacturers and count how many balsa or other wood baits are offered. Not many! You usually have to go to "boutique shops" to find them. There are rational reasons for this, including quality control and volume production reasons. But I personally think the best wood lures are better than the best plastic lures. So to me, Rapala deserves kudos for working in wood baits and I'm not quite ready to ascribe "shady commercial motives" to my dislike of the Scatter Shad. I'll continue trying future Rapalas and will keep buying some favorites from them as long as they make them. But I won't be buying more Scatter Shads and I'll wait for kudos to appear among the user community before taking a chance on any of the other Scatter baits.

I regularly fish Rapalas and the Scatter Shads were a disappointment to me. It may be that the scatter lip was originally designed for one of the scatter series that I did not try and it might work great on that model and not on the Scatter Shad - who knows? I got the scatter shad because it was the only one of the series with enough weight to cast with a baitcast reel.

I like many of the lures in the Rapala line. Got a couple of the scatter shads recently and frankly, I don't think I'll ever fish them. It's hard to retrieve them without spiraling and that is not "hunting" - which should and can work at any retrieve speed.