Vodkaman

Husky, no luck with the link, I'll try again tonight. I haven't studied swimbaits yet, they are my next project. But I have been collecting ideas. There are three possibilities (in my head): 1. Vortices, forming across the back, in a similar fashion to lip vortices (Many of you may not like the idea of vortices and are probably tired of reading this word, but they are a fact of life). 2. Aerodynamic type forces. The smooth flow past the sides of the body, draws the sides to swing out into the flow. One side is always going to be slightly stronger than the other and will swing out. It does not explain how the lure swings back. I thought maybe it stalls (like a wing stalls) and the suction collapses and the body swings back. Inertia carries it past neutral and the process repeats on the other side. I built a lure to explore this idea, more curvature on one side. It did not waggle and just took off at an angle. But I cannot discount the theory yet. 3. A combination of the above. The aerodynamic movement reaches a stall and vortices are created over the back. This vortex draws the body back to neutral, but inertia of the movement carries the body past neutral. The vortex fades and aerodynamic forces continue to pull the body now in the opposite direction until it again stalls and the process repeats. Now that I have written it down, the combo theory looks very promising. The problem is how to prove it. The best indication of the forces acting on a body, is how the body reacts to those forces. For example, if the bait has excessive rolling action, this would indicate to me a vortex across the back, causing a rotation. If the lure wiggled without roll, this would indicate aero theory. If the lure wiggled with a slight roll towards the end of the cycle, this would indicate combo theory. As stated above, it could be the hinges, or something we have not considered yet.

Nova and Willie have comprehensively covered your question. I would add, that seeing you are making the molds yourself, why not introduce a larger pouring cone or funnel. This will allow you to pour extra plastic, which will get drawn down as the plastic cools. This will simplify the pour and eliminate any possibility of cooling cracks. From reading your post, I assume that you are drilling your pour hole after making the mold. There is nothing wrong with this, I suspect most construct molds this way. I mold my pour holes and vents with rolled plasticine, before pouring the PoP. I find it simpler and less nerve wracking than drilling.

It has bags of character, it looks alive with the eyes and mouth. my suggestion is Mr Angry or stubby shark.

Works for me. I'm still serving my apprenticeship. Hopefully I will make some water time soon. Congratulations on your lure success.

I haven't a clue what you are asking for or doing with them. Intrigued enough to ask though. Could you please explain a little more? Thanks.

A picture of the mold and bait might help people see the fault. My first thought, is the end of the tail vented? Without an air vent, as the plastic is poured, the air in the thin section cannot get past the plastic and has no where to go. If this is confirmed as the problem, the solution is simple and the existing mold can be fixed.

That is what I did. I used an old calor gas, 15Kg. You would still have to get involved with pressure control and water traps, but I really know very little about these to help you. Good luck and report back.

The compressor can be used, I did the exact same thing some fifteen years ago. The air from the compressor will be too rough and uneaven to drive the brush directly. You need to use the compressor to fill a reservoir, a large gas cylinder. The reservoir feeds the brush with a smooth, regular supply of air. As for the required connections etc, too many years since I was involved, but should not be too difficult to find out. From previous posts, I believe many of the mentioned large American stores stock all this stuff.

Jerry, everything you state is correct of course. The best we can do is get it as close as possible and fine tune at the waters edge. Every day the same body of water will vary due to temperature. Another thought, if you use a quick release for attaching the line, this too should be included in the lures hardware. Regarding the buoyancy fix. True, the calculation is an iterative one. The answer has to be fed back into the question a few times to hone in to the real answer. Spreadsheets are very good for this application.

All the recent posts on leads toxicity has got me paranoid. Every time I touch lead, I cannot wait to wash my hands. This is a GOOD thing and thanks to all those who talk about the safety issues, in many cases lessons learned by painful experience. Good post Cadman.

http://www.tackleunderground.com/forum/hard-baits/13095-how-estimate-weight-needed.html This link covers a method of calculating volume by weighing a suspended body. http://www.tackleunderground.com/forum/hard-baits/12275-how-does-clearcoat-affect-bouyancy-lure.html This link discusses the effect of a D2T top coat. http://www.tackleunderground.com/forum/soft-plastics/10027-density-materials.html This link discusses other methods of calculating volume, like the pitchers and pans or jars and tubes, basically as stated above by fish devil. Both the above mentioned methods of calculating volume work, but the displacement method, using pitchers and pans, has accuracy problems. The smaller diameter the pitcher, the more accurate the result. For example, if the pitcher was the size of a bucket, you could almost submerge the lure without spilling, under normal meniscus tension. If the bucket was so full as to make spilling inevitable (forced meniscus tension), once the meniscus breaks and the water flows, it will not settle until it reaches its normal tension, thus giving a false high value of the weight. The following thoughts are not meant to put anyone off the idea of calculating ballast, in fact that is the direction I am heading myself. But it is meant to highlight the issues that effect the results. It is far more involved than the puzzle seems initially. Knowing the volume of your lure immediately gives you a figure to work with. It tells you how much the lure must weigh to be a suspender, provided you work in metric units. If you work in imperial units, you will get bogged down with incompatible units. Example metric. If a lure has a volume of 23 cm³ or 23 ml, its suspended weight will be 23 grams. Example imperial. If a lure has a volume of 1 inch cube or 0.554 US fluid ozs, its suspended weight will be 0.3197 ozs. It took me about 30 minutes, a couple of web searches, two large vodkas and a lot of number crunching to arrive at the US numbers above. Inconvenient to say the least. Conversely, using metric units, you do not need a calculator to convert volume to weight. But none of the above, or your question tackle the real problem. That is, you want to fit the ballast before the top coat. But D2T is heavier than water and will sink the lure. D2T has a density of 1.17gm/cm³. This means that D2T is 17% heavier than water. I fear that things are even more complicated than that. Think of it another way. Consider a lure (80mm length) of volume 23 cm³ with hardware and without top coat, requiring 1 gram of D2T. 1 gram of D2T has a volume of (1 / 1.17) 0.855 cm³. Adding the D2T increases the lure volume by 0.855 to 23.855 cm³ and also the suspended weight to 23.855 grams. The weight of the lure has increased by 1 gram to 24 grams. Therefore, the D2T has added (24.0 – 23.855) 0.145 grams and the lure sinks. But it gets worse! You drill the hole and fit the correct ballast and weigh the lure, just to check. The weight is wrong. The fact is that when you drilled the ballast hole, you removed some weight of body material. The result is light by this weight. Small but significant. My experience is that the range of tolerance for a suspender is approximately 1/100 of the weight of the lure, so for a 20 gram lure, accuracy of less than 0.2 grams is required. I will be putting all of these thoughts to a practical test soon, with the intention of producing a comprehensive spread sheet that will greatly simplify weighting suspenders. All this theory and calculation is well and good, but there is nothing wrong with good old trial and error. Hands on experience with suspenders can be quite pleasurable. I believe weighted stick-on dots can be purchased for the purpose of fine tuning suspenders. Another solution to fine tuning: Approximately 20mm of Φ1.05mm solder weighs 0.1 grams. So if you can get your finished lure very close to suspension, then by gluing the solder to the rear belly of the lure, the solder can be snipped to fine tune the suspension. The trailing solder also adds a little realism to the lure!

Must be some mistake, no way you could roll a joint, never mind inject something at that speed.

Just a thought, but you might do better with a resin body (alumilite). I think the wood compresses slightly with the teeth and this allows more penetration into your top coat. With a very hard resin body, the top coat might have a better chance of survival. It's another option available. Congrats with the fishing success.

Can't wait to see what you have come up with (absolutely no pressure). Reading some of your stories in 'the docks' would be entertaining too. Hope you enjoy TU and stay a while.

Love the name, are you really a ghillie? Welcome to TU.

There is no such thing as a good or bad blank, as long as the blank is symmetrical, it's a good'en. If your lure does not swim like you expected it to, there are a number of variables that can be adjusted to achieve what you want. These are: ballast position, ballast weight, ballast distribution, lip angle, lip shape, lip size, lip position, tow eye location, I've probably missed a few. I am not saying that all these variables have to be altered to get it to swim, but you should expect to have to mess with one or two to get what you want. You need to learn what effect each adjustment makes and remember it, better still, write it down. only adjust one feature at a time, otherwise you will not know which adjustment worked. This is called prototyping. Any time you create a new type of lure, you should set aside half a dozen bodies purely for testing the above variables, to find the combination that works for that body. The innitial prototyping can be done bare, but you must make your final adjustments on a prototype dressed with a few coats of paint, the exact number of top coats you intend to use and ALL the hardware attached. All these items will change the action or how the lure swims.

Well there you go! I googled it myself and, sure enough, polyester resin is not water proof and is prone to the same problems. I've got 2 litres of this stuff left and I'll be glad when its gone.

Don't feel bad about trashing the trike, the kids are going to trash your car in a few years.

I use resin for my wire work, purely because I have a few tins of it in my kitchen (work shop). I'm pretty sure someone is going to come and tell me that it too is not water proof. Fortunately, I am not selling anything yet, so I don't have to do any recalls! I've done pull tests and the results were very good.

There is nothing wrong with starting out with pre-formed bodies, although personally, the pleasure is making the bodies and being able to say, 'I made it'. Like anything, you cannot expect to get it right first time, BUT, it is not as difficult as some might have you believe. After you have made a dozen or two, you will wonder how you ever got it wrong. If your design is normal, 'middle of the road', nothing pushing the boundaries, there is no reason why it should not work first time. You develope a 'feel' for what will work and what won't. With your plastics experience, you are more than half way there in this respect. If you are unfortunate enough to make one that does not swim right. Do NOT throw it away. This is an opportunity for you to learn. Bring it to the forum for a discussion and many more people will learn too. As for cost, it can be one of the cheapest hobbies on the planet. A box cutter, sand paper, a wheel weight or two, acrylic paints, a scrap of plastic for the lip and a tube of epoxy. An airbrush would be nice, but many here produce outstanding, mind blowing work with spray cans, don't discount the humble brush either, though I never managed to brush anything that didn't look like a 4 year old had painted it. You can get drawn into a massive power tool collection. Very useful but not necessary at the start. Welcome to hardbaits Zbass, If you ask for help, just like in the plastics section, you WILL get it.

Welcome HJS, but don't put your lab coat away just yet, we have a ton of experiments for you to perform. Good feedback.

Welcome Bigbass73. A plethora of information on your chosen subjects is available here on TU. A good place to start would be the member submitted tutorials. After you have read those, try using the search function by typing in a few key words like: mold, plaster, pour, vent, bubbles, rubber, RTV, POP. If you can't find what you are looking for there, why not post a question or two. Ask specific questions rather than broad questions like 'how do you pour plastic worms'. You will be an expert in no time.

I am experimenting with 10 - 20% of the water. The PoP obviously takes a lot longer for all the elmers/PoP mix to totally harden, to get the max strength, as the mold dries from the outside, in. But it does not affect the functionality of the PoP mold as dried in the normal way. In other words, you can use the mold as normal. I would start off with 10%. Sorry about the poor explanation.

Welcome Zbass. Uploading photo's has been covered a lot recently. Search Spike-a-pike over the last week, I know he has answered this one. As for photo's, my only suggestion is always have something in the picture to provide scale. This could be deliberate such as a tape measure etc, or something that is there incidentally, like coins or keys. Pages have been written on lure photography, so ask about specific problems, focussing, camera shake, blur, etc. Search should pull up a lot of useful info too.

He's opened the lure tool box now, the house is going to have to wait. Great looking lure.