BobP

Whatever gas you use, I think the aim is to displace moisture-laden air from the storage container. Moisture cures MCU.

If you go to the Dixie Art webpage, they have exploded schematics for several airbrush brands. On Iwatas, the packing is a teflon screw that apparently inserts from the rear of the barrel. I've never heard of anyone replacing the needle packing. On most airbrushes, the packing is teflon that is resistant to solvents. I know that even acetone has no effect on my Iwatas. The packing is an area that is subject to getting gummed up with dried paint. I'd soak the brush in airbrush cleaner for 24 hrs to see if that fixes your problem before trying to replace it.

Reusable? No. I wouldn't re-use any jar for DN. I had my wife buy a dozen Ball canning jars at the local Dollar store. If it had been too expensive, I would have heard about it! If you dip lures, your DN will eventually begin to cure. Whatever you do - Bloxygen, etc, etc will delay but will not prevent it. By decanting into canning jars and using Bloxygen, I've kept DN for about a year, max. I've come to accept it as the nature of the beast because I REALLY LIKE the ease of use and the final product you get with DN. You can use epoxy on wood crankbaits and it works fine but there's really no substitute for DN if you want to coat metal spoons or dip repainted plastic baits.

I prefer the Smith Wildlife paints because of the color palette. However, Polytranspar also makes a great basecoat white called "Superhide White" - it's heavily pigmented and dries super fast to a hard shiny coat. The best I've tried - I buy the stuff by the pint! Taxidermy paint can be a crap shoot. There is more variability among brands and you are more likely to get differences between batches of the same paint, unlike Createx which is very consistent in formulation (which is why it is the standard). The upside is you can find colors that Createx will never offer. One of my favorites is Smith Wildlife Pearl Chrome. Overshoot it on a paint scheme to mute the colors and give the bait an overall "baitfish sheen". It has small chrome flakes that require a .3mm or larger airbrush tip to shoot.

http://www.mckenzies...lors-C2020.aspx It's hard to understand who owns whom in the paint business. I usually buy paint from WASCO but couldn't find Smith Wildlife paint in their current online site - but I did find the above. Apparently, they now own WASCO. Mckenzies is located in Granite Quarry, so maybe you could even drop by there! Hope this helps.

Looking at Wobble Bats on Ebay, one of the few places they are for sale, I do think the blades are Royal spinner blades. Can you get the same result on any shallow running crankbait with one of those blades? Don't see why not. But like any bait mod, it will require experimentation to get the blade size, attachment method, plus the crankbait shape and weight right.

X2 with Matt. If they are very professionally finished, they would appeal to all fishermen on Ebay. Unpainted, they appeal only to lure builders. So it boils down to the questions: "How well do you paint lures? And do you want to go to the trouble?"

A Google search on wood density is useful if you build crankbaits from different woods. There are tables 'out there' on the internet that list the "nominal density" of different wood species. Nominal means they took a variety of samples, dried them to the same water content, and averaged their densities - so your particular piece of wood may be different from the average. But the tables are nonetheless good when you want to compare different wood species when you order wood. I've tried to upload a wood density table to the site a couple of times, without much luck. Quickdraw, on average, bass wood is almost twice as dense as balsa. I use both for different shallow crankbaits but when I want maximum buoyancy, there really isn't any substitute for balsa. The closest wood I know to balsa is paulownia, which has a nominal density of 16 lbs/cu ft versus 12 for balsa.

Balsa is between 6 and 18 lbs/cubic ft, averaging 12 lbs/cu ft. I think 12 lb balsa is great for crankbaits but like Ben says, you pay considerably more if you want to specify what you order. I think it's worth it. To some extent, the density you want depends on how buoyant you really want the crankbait to be. I build some cranks with 6 lb balsa to get extreme buoyancy and show the bass something they won't see in any commercial bait - but you have to accept diminished durability when you do that (that's OK by me, I'll just build MORE!). But if you want a crankbait similar in performance to a Fat Rap, I think you'll want at least 12 lb balsa and will want to build it toward a finished target weight of a Fat Rap.

Take the tip assembly off the brush and push the trigger. Is air coming through the brush? If so, your tip is blocked. If not, the air valve that the trigger controls is blocked or broken.

X2 what Dick says. When I paint knockoffs I dip the whole bait including the lip in DN because it fills in all those tiny scratches and makes the lip much more transparent.

It's almost impossible to predict whether dissimilar coatings will be compatible, except I hear that polyurethanes are generally not compatible with enamels. The best you can do with rattle can paints is to buy them from the same "family" which are manufactured for compatibility. You might check some auto painting sites for specific info on what kinds of coatings can be layered.

I'm interested in 16lb polyurethane foam but haven't tried it. All said and done, I think it's the only molding material that comes close to the density of balsa - and that property makes it very interesting for bass baits. Suddeth baits used to sell 16lb foam baits and the company was sold to Blademaster Baits a few years ago, who still manufactures them. Suddeth baits were very popular in the SE and they had some unique designs. You could order baits from them to either float or suspend. I repainted a few Suddeths and the foam surface structure made refinishing an issue, which also exists with mold materials requiring microballoons.

I use an Iwata Revolution B with a .3mm tip for basecoating and an Iwata HP-B with .2mm tip for fine work. It's more the technique than the airbrush when it comes to detail work with an airbrush, so I think the Eclipse would probably be OK. If you're looking for a .3mm Iwata, the Revolution B is hard to beat for its very reasonable price, around $80. The quality is the same as other Iwata brushes, i.e., outstanding.

Mike, There's a guy, I think his name is James Marshall, in Kernersville who uses a custom made duplicating lathe to make custom cranks. I think the name they are sold under is "On The Line" crankbaits. If I remember correctly, someone said he quoted $20K to a guy who was interested in buying it. This info is all second hand and several years old from threads here on TU, so don't hold me to it! I'm betting that something from the furniture industry here in NC would also be adaptable to the task. There is a video on YouTube showing his process. I know lurepartsonline.com and several other companies sell unpainted balsa crankbaits. You could contact them directly and ask who their supplier is, maybe they could help.

I don't think D2T forms a stronger bond than other 30 minute glue epoxies, it's just good as a topcoat so has become popular. I've never had any kind of hardware pull out of a bait regardless of the type of epoxy used. Which I pick depends mostly on the pot life I need for a particular job. For a couple of baits, I'll use a 5 min epoxy to glue in ballast and hook hangers. If it's 4-5 baits, I'll switch to D2T or any other 30 minute glue epoxy. Lips are a different matter. Quick set 5 minute epoxies turn brown quickly when exposed to UV. I can wipe off the excess on a hanger or ballast and it will never show. But browned epoxy will show through a Lexan lip to the outside if you mount lips after the lure is painted, so I don't use it there. What I have come to like for mounting lips is Rod Bond Paste Epoxy. It is a light beige color when mixed and stays that color after curing. The big advantage is that you can mix a batch of Rod Bond and use it for at least two hours before it begins to harden. So you can do quite a large number of lips without remixing and you still have plenty of time to tweak them to insure they're in straight. It begins to significantly harden after about 5 hours and can be handled after 10-12 hrs, so it's something to use at the end of the day or when you won't need to handle the baits for 10-12 hrs.. There are lots of different formulations of superglue on the market these days - regular, zap a gap, shock resistant, etc I'm sure all of them work on hangers and ballasts - as long as the hardware fits properly so that it conforms to the type of superglue you're using. But I don't think any type of superglue is as shock resistant as epoxy so don't use it to mount lips. JMHO

I recently had some rod guide repairs to do and found the resin was crystallized and the hardener was orange. You can fix resin by heating it but there's nothing to do for hardener. I did a test batch like Ben suggests and it never really hardened, so I tossed the remainder. Problems like Mark's come down to the details. Was there anything in your epoxy mix besides epoxy? Is there any chance that a solvent was out-gassing from the body through the lip slot? If so, the closed lip slot may have prevented a solvent from escaping.

You're dealing with two processes. First the solvents in DN evaporate to form the film. Then the chemistry causes the film to interact with moisture to harden. The quicker the solvent is out-gassed, the faster you can re-coat, if that's what you feel is needed. Safety is safety but unless I hear about Pogue going "BANG", I doubt there's enough solvent on a couple of lures after a few minutes to cause an explosion in 100 degree heat. I guess my objections are more nuanced. How much more protection do you think multiple coats of DN provide and when you say 'protect' do you mean against hook rash or against water penetration? No topcoat is proof against hook rash but I've never had a single-coated lure cut so deeply that water penetrated beyond the finish. So practically, I just don't see the need for multiple coats on bass baits. Once I decided that, life became a lot simpler! Dip it, hang it, DONE.

To me, hunting means a lure intermittently kicking out to either side for a few beats but always naturally coming back to its central retrieve azimuth. I just didn't see that in the Zappu video. The Wobble Bat video showed what I think is extreme hunting (at high speed). A really good hunting bait will hunt at almost any retrieve speed and it's a quality that you see in very few commercial baits because they are designed to be "average performers". JMHO, there are various performance attributes that are important in a crankbait and I see hunting as a "nice to have" extra.

This is a pretty common problem with multiple coats of any MCU. You can minimize but probably not eliminate it by waiting at least 24 hrs between dips. After using DN for a couple of years, I saw that a single dip performs perfectly well on bass baits and makes the problem go away. There is probably an ideal recoat time for DN but I've not read or experienced what it is. I think "multiple dip syndrome" is something you get if you are used to thicker epoxy topcoats on crankbaits. But MCU is designed to be tough in a thin coating, just like a factory finish. In fact, it IS a factory finish!

Future works great but "There is no free lunch". If you're using Future floor polish to thin paint, one thing you don't want is dried paint inside the airbrush. Future is formulated to wear well on floors, and so it's tough stuff. I rinse out my a/b and backwash the tip after every paint shot but like most, I'm not always good about cleaning the whole brush after a painting session. I've sometimes left paint back in the barrel of the a/b around the needle packing. When that happens, the next time I use the brush, the trigger is stuck solid and will not move backwards because the Future set so hard in the barrel that it glued the needle in the packing. Takes needle nose pliers to rip the needle out of there! So do a very good cleaning before you store your a/b, if you use Future. The more volatile the solvent you use to clean an airbrush, the faster it works. Acetone works better/faster than most.

I've been painting for 10+ years and only recently realized a better way for shooting scale patterns. Thanks to Rayburn Guy! Shoot your white color basecoat. Shoot a medium gray (or any dark color you like) over the area to be scaled. Then put on the netting and shoot basecoat white over it. This makes for an extra step in the process but it makes for a much better defined, neater, scale pattern. After the last step you can remove the netting and mist on more white basecoat if desired to mute the scale pattern to taste. Then use transparent colors to finish painting over the scale effect. I use Polytranspar Superhide White airbrush paint for color basecoating. It has lots of white pigment, shoots well, and dries very quickly to a hard semigloss finish. Most airbrush paint lines contain a heavily pigmented white paint designed just for basecoating. Polytranspar is just my favorite.