mark poulson

If you T your trebles, you won't get hook rash.

First of all, beautiful boat, ugly shoes. Second, if you're going to use the livewell for bait, you might want to just put in a formica strip the height of the livewell, and long enough to overlap when it's in the livewell. On our SoCal lakes, shad are the predominant baitfish, and they last much longer in a round livewell, or one that has softer corners. The formica, coiled tight when you put it in, and then released to open as much as it can, is rigid enough to hold a semi-circular shape against the sides of the livewell due to it's natural spring. That is, it wants to straighten out by itself. I did it in my Tracker livewell, and the shad lasted all day. Since my Tracker was totaled by a hit and run driver last March, I've replace it with a small Ranger fiberglass boat (17'7") and the livewell is peanut shaped, so I haven't even tried to refit it for shad yet.

Smallie, Osprey, for one, and a lot of other swimbaits had those features before the swimbabe. It's kind of an evolutionary thing. According to Bill Siemental, the maker of the BBZ 1, all soft plastic swimbaits are just a variation of the old Sassy Shad salt water bait. I just want to know what he was drinking when he dreamed up that design, so I can stay away from it!

With the BBZ 1, a great but mass produced lure, going for $40, his price for a hand made lure is reasonable. Think how much time he has in each one.

Another home run! Good for you.

Dean, I can just picture you in the cosmetics section, thrusting your gun skyward in a manly pose!

Dave, I think of a surface glider as an oversized Sammy. The Pupfish, a knockoff of the Mega Bass Dog, is the gold standard, and the Lunker Punker is the current reigning champ. It is walked side to side, and the amount it moves is determined by the cadence and length of pause. A hard swimbait, to me, is a baitfish replica that is larger than the big deep diving cranks. It can be one piece, but generally is jointed to give it a swimming action. The earliest hard swimbaits had bills to initiate their actions, like a crank, and lots of the current crop of jointed swimbaits have bills, too. As they say, size matters. I think of swimbaits as being at least 4" in length. But the actual definition of a swimbait is a mystery to me.

Anyone here make a 4" ribbon tail worm? My partner and I finished the last of a 20 year old bag the other day, and can't find more. The body is about 2 1/2" long, the other 1 1/2" is the tail. The body is like a power worm, with little beads back to back. They are about 3/16" in diameter. The color we had was a clear/amber with black and red flake. I'm interested in buying some.

Dave, Good luck. Every time I use a stencil, I get all screwed up. and I can't freehand, either, so I'm lost!

Sweet! How much does it weigh? Does it have a bill?

Thanks.

rofish, Thanks for the tip. I can just see myself trying to convince my kids to eat stuff because I want the labels! Funny thing is, here in the US, there used to be an aluminum foil sold with a scale pattern already stamped into it. "Kaiser foil is quilted, and it's the only foil that is." That was there slogan, and they touted how strong their foil was compared to others due to the cross hatched quilting it had. Now, when I could finally use it, they're gone!

Dave, Thanks for the kind words. Here's a riddle I bet you can answer. I've found that gliders, for me, work best when they are more round on the bottom, and not too tall, almost cylindrical, but my swimbaits seem to swim better if they are more "rectangular" in cross section. I've kind of figured out that the round bottom on my surface gliders helps them to change direction with less effort, skidding over the water instead of plowing through it, but I still don't have a clue why the rectangular shape, tall and thin, works for swimbaits, while the more round section doesn't work as well. So what is it about the two body cross sections that makes such a difference?

Thanks for sharing all your information like this. We all can use as much help as we can get, and the stuff you just posted will save me another false start.

Funny how ideas come to us. I was cleaning up my workbench, and saw some 2 1/4" deep Plano box dividers that I hadn't used lying there. Bingo! It's better to be lucky than good!

rofish, Nice looking foil jobs. Where'd you get the textured foil?

Dieter, Dave had the answer. Sealed lips. More specifically, filling the lip slot with D2T before you insert it, and making sure it's sealed with the epoxy, and top coat. I wouldn't worry about the lip being too flexible, since I'm using it on lures that are shallow runners, so the lip flexing a little won't be a problem. I don't know how well it would hold up, flex-wise- on a medium or deep diver, and I don't know how it would hold a line tie, but it will glue in well enough. boomah21, I don't think it will warp. I've had plano boxes in the boat for years, and never had one warp. I guess only time will tell. For me, it was worth a try, and the worst thing that might happen is it would fail. But I wouldn't know if I didn't try. I'm thinking it will make great tail material, too.

Sorry about that, John. I saw the 5' min. order part, but not the $200 slitting charge. That does make it expensive. Too bad. I thought their 1/6" gum rubber would have been great matl. for tails.

Don't tell anyone Dave, or they'll raise the price of Plano boxes.

I had to finish a lure, and test it, before I made this post. First off, I am not a commercial lure builder. I make them for fun for me and my friends. I put a bill in a jointed lure that wouldn't swim well, and it worked (see the gallery) I didn't have any lexan or other bill material in the garage, but I did had hundreds of Plano dividers. I cut out a profile of what I thought the bill should be, left it a little long, so I could trim it with a pair of sheet metal cutters at the test pond, and epoxied it in. It isn't clear, but it's translucent, and it's flexible, so it wouldn't work for crashing lures into rocks, probably. But it's rigid enough for wake bait lips, swim bait lips, and shallow cranks, which only have to deal with branches. The material is tough, so I don't worry about it failing any time soon. And it's not really noticeable in the water. The best part is it's cheap, available, and it works!

Solvent based contact cement can fail in sunlight/heat. Be sure it's really cured out before you proceed.