mark poulson

Put them in the basement of a jail with a slab floor.

Dollar store clear nail polish holds up just as well, and is fast and cheap (my mantra).

Dude, clearly you've got it wired! Hahaha

I do 10 5" swimbait open pour silicone mold cavities at a time, and my baits don't delaminate. Just plan ahead, and be efficient, and you'll get a good routine down.

I hand pour laminates in open silicone molds. I pour the first color, and then go back over that with the second, heated to 340+ degrees so it bonds with the first color. I still get some not too well bonded heads sometimes, but they don't come apart when I fish them.

Nice bait. Clever side fin attachment!

I use a UV cure finger nail light, standing on it's end so the open mouth is up. I use Solarez UV Dual Cure resin, and I rotate my lures every 30 seconds. They cure hard in three minutes. If it begins to take longer, I know it's time to replace the bulbs.

For me, the lures need continual exposure to the UV light to cure. I have not used Alumi-UV but I have used Solarez Dual Cure resin for years. Be sure your UV lights are the right frequency for the resin you're using. Just because a light is UV doesn't mean it's what that resin needs.

I install my swivels with the embedded eye parallel to a line from the front of the lure to the back. That way, I can mark where it should be on the side of the lure before I install it, and then drill a hole from one side to the other for the spinnerbait wire. I install the swivel dry first, to be sure the wire pin actually passes through the embedded eye. It's simple to do a pull test at that point. If I find I've missed (heaven forbid), I just redrill and move the pin to engage the eye. Then I carefully glue the swivel in place, making sure not to glue the hook eye part. Last, I insert the pin, and glue over the pin holes with some super glue. The pin fits so tightly that the glue really isn't necessary, but it's part of my routine now. Vodkaman Dave is right. Any really strong pin material will work. Spinnerbait wire is just what I have on hand, so that's what I use. Once I found out it worked, I never looked for anything else. Too lazy! Hahaha

Read this: The PVC decking I use (Azek) is as buoyant as poplar, and plenty strong to hold screw eyes. You can reduce the risk of pull outs on the belly hanger(s) by using a strong Spro swivel as your hook hanger, and passing a piece of spinnerbait wire from side to side through the eye that's embedded in the bait. That will keep the fish from being able to use the lure's weight as leverage to rip out the trebles.

If you are adding flake, that may be part of the problem. I had trouble with my watermelon/red flake turning into brownish with orange flake. Leonard at Bait Junky's told me that was probably due to flake that wasn't heat resistant. I tried heat resistant flake, and the problem went away.

I used Elmer's white glue, and it worked. I thinned it a little with plain water, and the crackle pattern was smaller.

Google router dust collection systems.

Be sure your POP is completely dry before you seal it with a glue/water mix, or you can get mold under the sealer, which will eventually fail. Don't ask me how I know, but I am going to have to redo my rage craw mold next week! The half sealed with diluted epoxy is fine, but I have to do both halves again, because I can't get the soft plastic masters to go back into the epoxy sealed side. Grrr!!! Hahaha

Ted, Could you chuck the plunger into a drill and use it to rotate your steel wool in the hole to clean it out?

Try using toe nail clippers to trim a round eye to that shape.

What a great idea!

White, a little yellow, and then a drop of brown to taste. Or you can add a drop of black to get a grey bone.

If you get a respirator with an activated carbon filter, be sure and store it in a sealed Ziplok bag when it's not in use. Otherwise, the activated carbon will continue sucking crap out of the air, and become useless much sooner.

You can try using clear nail polish. Two or three coats, until it's built up to the epoxy level.

I did have the same moving ballast in all the baits, up 1/4" above the line tie to rear hook hanger line, and 1/4" behind a line drawn perpendicular to that line up from the 3 gram belly hanger/weight combination. My next prototype would have been with no moving ballast, and a 4 gram belly weight, repeating the longer bill experiment, if these hadn't succeeded. Fortunately, I don't have to go to through that exercise. While I enjoy making baits, I'd much rather find one that works, and just duplicate that one. I am lazy!

Since they are stone molds, and not aluminum, could you enlarge the runner with a dremel tool grinding bit, since what it looks like doesn't matter?

In a follow up, I made two more shallow running 2.5 baits, with longer bills. The first one's bill was a tad under 1" (the thickness of a pencil line) out from the front of the lure. It hunts at a low or moderate retrieve, moving back and forth from a straight line retrieve about 6", from what I could see in the dirty water. On a high speed retrieve, the bait rolls. The second one's bill was 15/16" out from the front of the lure. It hunts at both low and high speed retrieves The water is too dirty to see how much. Both baits has as identical as I could make them bodies, bills, ballast, and lip angles. Clearly, the length of the bill is what affects the bait's hunting action, at least in my prototypes. My hat's off to Vodkaman Dave! He solved it in a reproducible way, so I have a great starting point for any cranks I make that I want to hunt. So I know have four baits that hunt, two shallow (3-4'), and two deeper (6-8'). I'm going to paint the shallow ones with a red craw pattern, and the two deeper ones with a bluegill pattern. The other two deeper baits that don't hunt, but swim just fine, I'll probably paint in a chart. sexy shad pattern, since that simulates lots of the baitfish here on the CA Delta.

Someone posted about a new Rustoleum product that is supposed to work well if misted every 20 seconds over a really smooth base, like an epoxy coat. I don't remember what it's called, but it is out there, and I saw a video of it working, so good luck.

Man, I love it when you engineers talk dirty like this! Hahaha Seriously, I can't wait to see/hear your results. I'm going to make another version of my 2.5 shallow runner today, with the moving ballast more over the belly weight, to see how it behaves. Of course, I probably won't get to test swim it until Friday, when it stops raining and blowing. Right now the water's chocolate and I can't see down 6".