mark poulson

Yesterday I mixed up some sky blue plastic, heated it to 350, added some garlic scent, reheated back up to 350, and poured it. The baits came out soft and sticky. Is it the scent? The plastisol is a med. that I've poured with before, with no problems. I got the sky blue with blue and white coloring. Could the coloring be what's making it sticky? I'm stumped. Help!!

Well, however and wherever you learned it, you certainly learned it very well! Hats off to your painting skills. A sidebar. I mixed some soft plastic glitter into my colored powdercoat paint, specifically purple flake into brown powder, and it worked fine. Does anyone else do this, or is coating with clear and flake a more used method?

Thanks. That's what it looked like to me. The 746 is a better hook. I may let my powdercoat go up the shank to the middle of the bend, so try and stiffen the hooks a little, and to see if it protects them from salty trailers. If that is too much like work, I'll probably just live with it, since I lose many jigs before they get rusty anyway.

I drop them into a tupperware with salt in it, and shake them up. The salt keeps them from sticking together, and makes them easier to lay out afterward, if needed.

VersatileFuturian, The "grooves" in the bait you showed look pretty deep. They must be magicians, to be able to do it to a hollow plastic lure. I think that would be easier with a wood or solid lure, as opposed to a hollow plastic lure, to allow that much material to be removed safely. I'm sure I'd plunge right through the sides of a plastic lure if I tried it. If you have a wood, resin, or PCV lure I'm sure you could do that with a dremel mounted sanding drum. Or hand carve them. It's a neat looking effect.

I recently bought some 1/4 and 3/8 oz football jigs, and they came with Mustad 32756 hooks. When they arrived, I was skeptical of how the hooks would hold up. The hook didn't open up on a 4lb bass, but that hook got dull quick. I had to resharpen it twice before the rocks ate it. And I saw on the Mustad website that the 756 isn't rated for salt, so I have to be sure and remove any salted trailers after I've fished, but the 746BLN is salt rated. I have some jigs I've had poured with the 746BLN, and it seems to be a stronger hook, too. Are they the same hook, but with different coatings?

Interesting read. Thanks for the link. I have made all those mistakes, because I never knew the right way to crimp.

Yozuri has come out with a line of cranks that has small vertical grooves, too.

Rick Clunn came out with a crankbait series a while back that had grooves, to "change it's hydrodynamic signature". I would worry about weaking a plastic bait by grooving it. Maybe you could just add vertical ribs with either clear silicone or epoxy, or even hot glue. Or, dare I say it, nail polish. Just a thought.

Sam, I posted some in the Hard Baits gallery. Sonny, Thanks. I posted about nail polish because it is a quick and easy system, not because it's better than air brushing. I put one of my air brushed baby bass lures next to the nail polished lure, and the nail polish looks crude by comparison. I find that blending is a bit harder with nail polish, and I'm usually too impatient to take a lot of time doing it, since I know it doesn't make too much difference to the fish. But the nail polish is more translucent. I get translucent paint jobs with Createx by thinning it, and spraying light coats. I think of it as more of a fog coat. I have a work light on my bench, and I hold the lures up to it to check them as I paint, so I don't overpaint, when I want translucent. But I've found that, to get truly translucent lures I do better using a clear nail polish with glitter. I just put several coats on the back, so it's "darker" than the bottom. From below, the back shows through, but has a 3D look as the bait is rotated, since the clear body separates the back and the belly. Nail polish won't replace air brushing for me. It's just another method that saves me time when I'm in a hurry.

Wow, Blades, you really have it down to a science.

Store your respirator in a sealed plastic bag, or it will continue to soak up anything fumes that are in the air where it's stored, and will stop working sooner.

cadman, Your paint jobs are amazing!!!!

Good choice! Good luck on the move.

Is that Osage as in the Osage orange tree? Fruit wood is very oily, as are most hardwoods. The oil in the sawdust is very allergic, and the oil in walnut can actually give you a rash on your arms. I worked on a family room for six weeks, building solid walnut cabinets, a bar, and paneling the walls. By the end of the day, my finger tips would be black from the oil, and I would have to use Neosynefren nose drops to clean out the black sawdust, even though we wore dust masks.

I've fished his Megabass X80 ko's, and they are good. They are light, and harder to cast than I like, so I drill the back where the second set of plastic nibs is located, and add three or four ball bearings, to get the head down attitude when they float, and to act as a weight transfer for casting. They cast much better, dive faster, and catch fish.

If you're using wood, then by all means cover over the holes with epoxy after they're in place. It's not to keep them in the predrilled holes, it's to keep as much water out as you can. If you're using PVC, there's no need to seal the holes, since it's totally waterproof. My pins are a snug fit. If I think a hinge pin is a little loose, I'll put a slight bend in it near the top, so it's forced into the last part of the hole, and it holds fine

If it looks good to you, grab it! I use the cheapest brand that CVS carries, if it has the colors I want. $1 or $2 a bottle. Right now they're carrying Wet 'n Wild, and Confetti as their cheapest brands. Wet 'n Wild has a good clear, and some nice solid colors with glitter highlites, and Confetti has clears with glitter already in them. Sometimes I may splurge and buy one bottle of Revlon, or Sally Hansen, if they have a weird color I like. But the cheap stuff works great, and holds up, too. I mix brown and green to make green pumpkin, which works great for baby bass patterns. Different greens make different shades, but they all work. You can take a light green, mix in some dark brown, and then some black if it's not dark enough yet. Basic white makes great bellies. Red is great for making popper and sammie mouths, and throat markings under the lip on jerkbaits. SoIvent based markers run if you use them under nail polish, so I make the zigzag black marks on the sides and cheeks of the baby bass with water based markers, heat set/dry with a hair dryer, and then coat over that with clear nail polish at the same time I coat over the 3D eyes. After I'm done with all the nail polish, I use a red sharpie to mark the gills. Shopping for nail polish give me a chance to talk to all the pretty young women who work in the cosmetics section.

I've built and painted a lot of lures now, and the "new" has kind of worn off of painting for me. At first, it was the only way I knew to get a finish on a lure, back when I used rattle cans. When I started airbrushing, it was fun to learn different skills, like finding new and unique paint schemes, and scaling schemes. Finally, it turned into a necessity. When I built walking lures and jointed swimbaits in batches of six, for sale, I need a way of making "identical" finishes on lure quickly and repeatability. Airbrushing was the answer. And I got into the search for the "perfect" sealer and topcoat. Along the way I discovered that making lures for sale took away the fun for me, and that I'd rather fish than paint. I have turned to PVC for building, eliminating the need to seal wood, to prime, and to have a bullet proof topcoat. And I've turned to nail polish for my painting where I can. So, on my PVC cranks and on plastic knockoffs, I've begun doing the entire paint scheme with nail polishes. The color combinations are endless, I mix two different colors to get a color I can't buy, and they even sell a clear with glitter. If I want a glitter that's not available, I just add soft plastic glitter to clear polish to make that color glitter. And I use clear polish to lock on the self-adhesive 3D eyes. The polish holds up great, and it quick. No additional top coat needed. Paint one day, fish the next. With the clear plastic knockoffs from Predator Bass and Bustin Bass, I am also able to get transparent finishes, and the nail polish brush allows me to add a mottled appearance that looks great from below in clear water. Layering is just a matter of letting one coat dry, and then adding another. The buildup of color is fast and easy. And the colors don't fade. Again, I'm a hobbiest, not a production builder, and got into lure building only to replace a buddy's Pupfish that I broke, so my experience is from that perspective. But cheap nail polish makes lure painting fast and easy, so I wanted to share my experiences with it here. The fish in my avatar, 8.37lbs, came on a PVC popper I made and finished with nail polish. The fish didn't care.

I haven't turned it on a lathe yet, but it machines like wood in every other respect, so I'd expect it to turn just fine. Be sure to use sharp tools.

I agree. Belt sanders, and sanding in general, makes tons of dust that raises hell with my sinuses. I always wear a dust mask when I'm sanding. The Rigid ocillating belt sander I use has a dust extraction port on the back, for hooking up a vac while i'm sanding, and I never sand without it. Gene, with friends like you..... Hahaha