carolinamike

We started out with me just doing hand pours for myself, then a couple of fishing buddies wanted them. Then a couple of stores found out about them, then the next thing you know we have a business. Then after several years, approximately 8 years, demand increased so we came up with the idea of buying large production molds and an injection machine. Now we have two machines and only manufacture for other companies. We currently work for six companies with four more coming on board this year. That being said, it is possible to go from a hobby to a part time business to a full time business. But you've already received some great advice. Jeff is right you need to really be sure of what you're doing and take into consideration all aspects of the industry, and I mean all aspects of the industry. And 152nd St. is also right about marketing being a very big part of your business and a very expensive part of your business. Also I agree with Frank, you need to hunt for a niche that no one else is willing to fill. Be it design or different colors. That's the main way I got my foot in the door of most stores when I was doing hand pours. Also unique designs will carry you far in this business but with this also comes a considerable amount of expense. For a unique design you have to do one of two things, you have to spend a large amount of money for patents and then have a large amount of money to protect your patents. A patent is worth nothing if it can't be protected and this is a huge expense. Your other choice with a unique design is to make sure that you have enough product that if it does go big, you're able to flood the market and meet the immediate demand. This is also very expensive, remember it takes most large companies 3-6 months to get a mold made and product produced to knock you off, this 3-6 month period and can be up to a year is your money making time. And as far a people blowing up with success in this business, I feel the Sweet Beaver and the Alabama rig are two prime examples of this. When it comes to bigger companies buying you out or making the little guy rich, you just don't hear that much of it. Big companies want you to put in all the expense and time, they want you to do all the hard work, get things to a profitable point, that's when they want to make their purchase. And some people do get large amounts of money, but they almost never get paid for their efforts and hard work from a buyout. I have a customer who is a prime example of this. I won't name his company, but his first 11 months of business, his total purchases from us was well over $100,000.00. So along comes Stanley Bait company and offers him $100,000.00 with a small percentage for x number of years, of course my customer declined the offer. And the thing about it is, Stanley acted like they were doing him a favor. Then they knocked his product off and their product failed. In this industry, too big too fast will bring you down. Always be open to new ideas and new ways of doing things. Look for fill in areas. Find your niche. Do your homework, see what people want that they can't get and help them meet their needs. Always make sure, no matter how big or small you are to keep a hands on attitude, good quality products are very important. These are just some of the things that we did in order to become a full time business. Work your butt off and be careful what you wish for. Good luck, if there's ever anything I can do to help, don't hesitate to ask. Mike

I agree with Bob, hard to price a pig in a poke till you see the pig.

Everyone on here does understand about cooling, but how do you know the bait is perfect unless you demold it? So, it kind of sounded like that you had a machine that could make a ready to go stick bait every 5 seconds, and I'm definitely not being critical here, just trying to help you out. 5 seconds to fill a single cavity is just not that fast. But to give you an answer to your question, I think everyone on here would want to pay as little as possible. lol Now if you do have a machine that makes a ready to go stick bait every 5 seconds I think a lot of people would be interested in it. It would enable you to keep up with the competition.

I think if you'd clear up a few things you might get more of an answer to what you're looking for. You use the terms pour and pump out, it's confusing, are you talking about open pour molds or injected molds? What is the actual amount of plastisol the machine will hold in ounces? Are you talking single, two or three color? Also will it work with multi-cavity molds or single cavity molds? Also you said it turns out baits every 5 seconds, that's just not a feasible time for a quality bait. How much time is involved in the injection and how much time is involved in the cooling? 5 seconds is just not enough time for a decent size stick bait. It's confusing, do you mean you can fill the cavity in 5 seconds or do you have a ready to demold bait in 5 seconds? A little bit of clarification will help you get more responses to your post.

Jeff is definitely right. You do not want to make worms in your house, even in a garage or outdoor building I would still use some type of ventilation. If you accidently burn the plastisol to the point that it turns black and spongy, do not and I repeat do not, open your microwave for an hour or so. When plastisol is burnt to this point the fumes off of it become a type of acid and will cause a lot of severe damage to soft tissue, such as your eyes, your lungs, your sinuses. I made this mistake one time. I immediately exited my building and didn't go back in for an hour or so. When I did go back in to check on things, you should see how bad it stained an aluminum mold. I just couldn't imagine this being my eyes or lungs. So always keep safety in mind, chemical pneumonia will kill you.

Plastisol is something you need to form your own opinion about. No one company's plastisol is better than the other, plastisol is all about which one works best for you. My suggestion is to get a small sample of all the plastisols out there and see which one you like the best. Here is a list of other companies, some may give you a small free sample and some will want you to pay for it. When you try them be sure and post and let us all know which one you liked and why Lureworks- spikeit.com Bear Baits MF manufactoring Lurecraft All of these folks have good plastisol, some just work better than others for certain applications. Just remember that its all about what works best for you.

Chong, one of the more common plasticizers that I know of is D.I.N.P.(Di-isononyl phthalate). I also like the picture, is that a snake head? I hear that they're a great fish to eat.

P.M. sent

Hello, my name is Mike and I am a plastiholic. My addiction has gotten to the point that I've had to become a dealer to keep up my own habit. At first I was happy just doing for myself, then I started supplying others a little here and there. Now it's gotten to the point where not only am I compelled for myself, but it is so bad I must produce for other people, pray for me.

Sorry about that guys I don't know how this came up as another post, but this is the picture I was referring to.

Bob, you're not only disagreeing with me on the venting, but you're also disagreeing with companies like Zorn Molds and D&L Molds. Both are very large companies with several employees who specialize specifically in large scale production molds for the soft plastic industry. And what you're talking about is simple plastic shrinkage and has nothing to do with venting. That's the reason people have to keep topping off their molds because as the plastic cools it shrinks but the sides of the baits are formed instantly. If you have a cool mold and you shoot the bait and instantly demold it just as fast as you can, you'll find the outside of the bait has formed, therefore it has solidified, not being able to pull from the vents, it has to pull from the opening that's still hot at the end of the sprue. The softer the plastic, the thicker the bait, the worse the dent will be because the softer the plastic, the more it shrinks. These all are definitely facts, and you can ask any large producer of plastic in the industry. Time, temperature and pressure are the 3 keys to making a quality product and considering I've made and sold well over a million pieces last year I do know a little bit about this. But it sounds like shrinkage was only part of his problem. Also every one of my molds are water cooled and I have no issues and there is definitely no safety problems. When in production, our molds don't run over 70 degrees. Bob, I've had my fair share of denting problems, one of the bluegill bodies that I make was a severe denter, no matter how much pressure, or time I gave it, I still had a dent the size of the end of your finger, and when I talk about pressure, my small press has 8000 lbs of closing force and I've parted it a couple of times. But when I changed from a medium to a medium hard plastisol, the problem stopped. The harder the plastic the less shrinkage. If what you're saying is true, then why doesn't an open hand pour mold have a severe shrinkage dimple? It is capable of drawing as much air as it wants. An open pour mold shrinks from the top down, it doesn't draw bubbles out of the air into the plastic, it just shrinks. And you don't get dimples on the side of the bait, just at the top. This is because that is the hottest point for shrinkage to take place. The sides of the bait form immediately. Bob I've never seen a bait that couldn't be vented in a certain spot. Like I've said before, from nose to tail, the standard is venting every 1/4 inch on both sides of the bait. There does have to be deeper dump channels, to make sure the air has plenty of room to escape once vented, and sometimes, these deeper channels have holes in them to let the air escape completely from the mold, but no plastic goes into the vents whatsoever. There are no holes to clean out. And as far as say the legs of the bait not filling out, it could be a venting issue, but it could very well be a freeze off issue also. In other words, the plastic is cooling before it reaches the bottom of the caivity. Now if you have a large bubble void, that looks like a bubble has popped, or if you have a large bubble in the bait and you're absolutely sure there was no bubble in the plastic, then it's definitely a venting problem and can be nothing else but. And as far as gravity goes, all large scale production molds are standardly shot from the bottom up, so gravity really has no play in pushing the air out. Sufficient venting is a must. The only exception to this rule that I know of in large scale production is pie molds that lay flat and shoot from the side. This technique does not work with some baits because you can't get the air out of them. As far as the sprues go, I've made a rough drawing of the ones I was talking about and have an arrow drawn to it where I feel like the sprue is too long and causing a problem. Also on this same drawing, I've circled the spot that I don't understand why moldmakers don't vent. Almost all of the hand injected molds I've seen don't apprear to have a vent at the end of the sprue. So instead of getting the plastic as fast as possible into the mold, you have to force the air through each cavity. All of my runners or sprues, are vented to allow maximum delivery of the hot plastic. Not all molds are made like the one I'm talking about, but the ones that are made like this make it impossible to hold any amount of pressure because the sprue is freezing off before the bait preventing actual pressure to the cavity. Therefore, causing a shrinkage dimple. I've also drawn down below that one, the way to me it would be obvious to do a mold in order to keep adequate pressure to relieve some venting problems. I've seen several molds that are being done this way. But if your bait immediately branches off of the main runner, then you should have no reason for a heat sink. You would use less material, the mold maker would use less material and the production would be faster because you're delivering the plastic almost directly into the bait cavity. Probably not that much faster, but faster all the same. I mentioned that my biggest runner was 3/8", I did fail to mention that my smallest one is 3/16" and you're absolutely right Bob, this is a very forgiving mold. 200 baits have a turn around time of around 40 seconds and they absolutely never dent. But the smaller the bait, the more pressure I can put to it. If I try to shoot a larger bait with the same pressure that I shoot the smaller bait it would actually part the press and flash terribly, and I talking about the press with 15000 lbs of closing force. I'm far from a big time bait maker but I am lucky enough to be able to do this for a living but remember I'm only about 5 years into this end of it, there's 9 years plus of hand pouring and hand injecting and a lot of this work was done before hand injection was ever a standard. The small bait up there that I just mentioned I used to produce by pouring hot plastic into a reservoir at the top of the mold and taking an aluminum plunger and forcing the plastic down into the cavities. We made thousands and thousands this way. Imagine my shock the first time I ran the production mold. I agree with you, some people don't have any trouble but it seems like this issue is coming up a lot here lately. Truthfully I think between me and you the softness of the material has a lot to do with it. A lot of the more experienced pourers after buying their plastisol still kind of do their own things and mix their own formulas working out these problems. As far as dents from major companies go, I got a pack of the Z company's the other day, to do a color match for a customer, every bait was severely dented and I mean severely dented and not in the thickest part of the bait either but actually at the hook point of the bait. And it's real obvious to tell by the shape of these dents and the severity of them, that they definitely have a pressure problem. And as far as lizards go, they are almost impossible not to have some sort of dent. For some reason, the belly of a lizard just wants to cave in. I don't have that problem myself, but lizards are one of the worst to dent along with stick baits. And to make sure that I haven't given any wrong information because this is something I would never knowingly do, I called one of the higher ups today before I posted to make sure I was correct on what I was saying and they assured me I was 100% accurate. And yes these folks are big time in the industry. Real big. Cormorant the only thing I can add if you're getting microbubbles in the bait then they are being drawn in from the injector, if there's no microbubbles in the plastic when you pull it up in the injector, then there should be no microbubbles in the bait. But like I said, there's 3 main variables to producing good products in soft plastics, time, temperature and pressure. Any bad baits can always be attributed to one of these factors.

Frank, I consider a professional mold maker as someone that can make a large scale production mold, that can do laminates from top to bottom or side to side or triple laminate or laminate with a different color tail or a two colored bait, one that does it for a living and makes them work and do what they're supposed to do. I agree with you 100% that there's a learning curve here but it seems all in all there's been a lot of posts by different people, some with a lot of experience, having these same problems that are recurring lately. In soft plastics I don't think there is such thing as too much venting, and remember the venting is only done on one side of the mold. I'm not sure what orders he's worried about, if it's a mold that he's waiting on, a little extra venting won't hurt. If it's an air bubble in the bait, and it's constantly forming in the same place, no matter how fast or how slow you go, no matter what plastic you use, then it is definitely a venting issue. Also Frank, I'm not sure exactly what you're talking about on the runner. Your molds may not be the way I've seen some of the other molds. The molds I'm referring to have like a 1/2" fill channel with what looks to be another sprue running off of it that is about 1/2" long before it actually gets to the bait cavity. On the picture, I took the baits off of the other side, that is just a piece of a big runner. There's actually 80 worms to the full runner, 40 on each side. I was just showing an example of how close I thought the bait should be to the main feed runner. I'm not sure if you're taking this wrong Frank, I'm not putting anyone's work down, but all of these are prototypes of large scale production molds, and I've never had one to fail, as many as I shoot. Remember that some of the vents in the picture are also just dump channels for the air, the main vents are the ones running every quarter inch down the bait. I've been at the same place that Cormorant is at and I can remember being desparate and trying everything I could, apparently he feels like he's over the learning curve or he's tried everything he can think of, so I'm just suggesting some other things to look at. It might not necessarily fix all of his problems, but it might help some.

I've looked at a lot of the hand injected molds out there and often wondered with the ones with multi-cavities why hasn't there been more problems. The softer the plastic the more it will shrink no matter what you add to it, unless you make the plastic harder, so adding things like a lot of salt is not going to help that much. Looking at the molds that are out there, I'm wondering why there aren't more venting issues, and there seems to be a lot of plastic waste. So I thought I'd put up a picture of some venting that is done on a professionally made prototype. Also, I've got a picture of some of the baits still attached to the runner, this is to show you an example of what I mean when I say waste. Someone made a comment about not being able to hold a heavy amount of pressure but you'd be surprised how much pressure, you can exert with very little effort. I know this is not exactly answering your questions in any way. I think the venting may be some of the issues with the molds with mulit-cavities. My example is a single cavity and look how much it's vented. If you're catching air bubbles and there's no air in your injector, then it's nothing but a venting problem.

I've been seeing a lot of folks asking about dents here lately. Dents are caused from plastic shrinkage, that's the reason you have to top off your mold and holding pressure on the bait also should eliminate it. But, if it's a thick bodied bait, your plastic has to be as cool as possible to form a good bait. If you've tried all this and you're still getting dents, then you are going to have to go with a harder material. The softer the plastisol the more it shrinks. I shoot as many as 90 worms at a time and some real thick bodied baits too and these are the only things that will solve the problem. Now that I've said that, I'm also kinda wondering about some of the molds that are being produced with multi-cavities. If any of you have ever gotten any of my runners or sprues, you'll notice that the bait is only 1/4 inch away from the main runner. From what pictures I've seen of some molds with multi-cavities, the branch off from the main runner seems to be considerably longer. And also, I'm noticing that the runners look like they're 1/2 inch in diameter. I have no runner that is over 3/8" in diameter. And remember my molds are 30" tall. With the bait being that far from the main runner, it would be almost impossible to keep pressure on the bait because your runner is cooling. I know a lot of the molds are designed to fit the hand injectors, but I haven't understood yet why someone doesn't downsize the runner a little. Less space to fill, the quicker the cavities fill and if the cavities are only 1/4" off the runner, then you should be able to hold pressure and have less material to remelt. The most pressure I use is 40 psi. On average 20 or 25 psi held for 30-40 seconds is about the time it takes to fill my molds all the way out without dents.

A lot of folks coat their mold with half water half elmer's glue. If you have a good and shiny cavity if it's still frosty looking then I would start leaning towards a plastic problem.

We're going to contact all of our customers and let them know about these folks. The last 7X4 bags I ordered was considerably higher than theirs. Their breakdown on large quantities is absolutely fantastic. I can already think of two of my customers that's going to save a lot of money this year.

Yeah you're right. All the same people. Apparently there are some liability issues that have come up with product repackaging. Truthfully, the only person I've talked to directly has been David at Bear's Baits, who by the way, I can't say enough good things about. I found myself in a tough situation the other week, not only did Bear help me out, he was also kind enough to give me the name of a supplier, but me and David have always worked together like that. And on the other hand the folks at Color Tech have always been great to me and the wife. And I think the world of those folks too. Bruce and Don have always been there for us if we found ourselves in a pinch. So this is kind of one of those fights I have to keep my dog out of.

I didn't realize Chemionices purchased 3G's, but I knew they were no longer in business. When Bruce was the owner and operator the product wasn't that bad at all. But when he left, someone else took over and I think it was completely downhill from there. I did receive a sample years ago, but Bruce had left. The stuff was really nasty, it had a very heavy petroleum smell before you heated it. It was tacky when it came out of the mold and still had a bad smell, just wasn't a quality product. Bruce has been around the plastic business a long time and a lot of his standard formulas are still copied by companies today. When he was taken out of the equation, it was definitely a downhill slide for 3G's from there on.

Guys, I don't think 3G's is in business anymore. 3G's was Bruce's company who now works for Lureworks.

Jeff, it's definitely not a moisture issue. For the cheaper microwaves that don't have heat settings it just doesn't work well. Works great in a Lee pot or Presto pot and microwaves that heat low and slow, but speed heating seems to produce microbubbles. But, if it is the company that people continually keep commenting about the microbubbles, the company has openly acknowledged that their plastisol is not for use with everyone's microwave and this same bubble issue comes up repeatedly over and over. That is the reason the company gives samples out for folks to try to see if it will work out for their application. Whether it makes bubbles, smells strong, has sediment in the bottom or is a little tacky when you take it out, but cures out fine after sitting overnight does not mean it's junk or bad plastisol. It just means it's not working in the application that you would like for it to. It always boils down to personal perference.

bass4cache, you told for how long you heated the plastisol but you didn't say whether or not your microwave has a heat setting. And from the times that you gave, it sounds like you were heating real fast, some plastisols will tolerate fast heating in the microwave better than others, but all plastisols do better when heated low and slow. Also I'm a little confused you also said you had bubbles from top to bottom, on the third picture that you show, you can easily see all the way through the plastisol, and it looks like a couple of dips with a tablespoon to take the bubbles off the top and you're good to go. And I also don't understand why you wouldn't contact the vendor if your're having a problem. Since you've already stated that it's not Jeff's plastic, and let's just say for example that it was, I'm sure Jeff as would all other vendors feel like they deserve a chance to make it good. Everyone has problems now and again, but since we're being careful not to name names, if it was the plastisol that you already know that some people are having trouble with bubbles, then you understood you were taking a chance in the beginning. I don't mean to be a smart a** but I think every vendor, no matter who it is, deserves the chance to make the product good. I know most vendors that if you're just completely dissatisfied with the product, almost always offer refunds. You should have contacted the vendor and if they didn't handle things to your satisifaction, then yes I myself would have probably posted about it. Every company deserves a chance to stand behind their product. If they don't do it, then that's a whole different ballgame. Also if it is the company that some people have had a problem with bubbles in the microwave, they offer free samples if you ask, I think it's only 8 ozs. but it should be sufficient enough for you to know if this is a product you want to use or not.