jamie

Mark just let me know. Ive been putting off useing pvc( dont know why) and I would also like to see how effective this product would be. Mark once you throw and learn how the bait moves you can really manipulate them through cover like downed trees and weed pockets. We catch nice sized bass while working these baits for musky in downed timber.Gliders is my favorite bait of choice and look forward when the right situation comes to use them.

Mark the line tie is fine on this bait. About 90% of what I make is glide baits and the problem is too much ballast. You take that same shape and make it out of oak with two 1/2 oz shots (1/2 oz in each of two holes)on a six or 7 inch bait and you will be close. Then fine tune with removing or adding a little shot to find neutral bouyancy.A glider should slice its way through the water with least amount of resistance. If you have any drag it really slows the action down.Moving the line tie under will cause a less desired effect on a sub- glider.

how old is your son? Crayola has many different painting options for kids. My son was painting baits at about age 3 or 4 and was useing paints from crayola. Let dry and heat set and its fun for them. When they are that young you just have to learn to live with the mess they make, just put down some paper and let them have fun. When you buy crayola paints they can use it for there own art work also on paper, I must have a 100 pics or so saved that he has painted me. he is 7 now and just won a art prize (best in the school) and his art was displayed at the charleston civic center a while back.

Dave you have me wondering now.

sorry tried to insert a pic. it didnt work

try thinng down some putty to a paste (not runny but thin),brush it on and let dry then sand.it.

I feel that I could be one of the 20 + members who could write for an hour on this subject so I will be short this time. the best thing I ever did was to make a test bait drill a hole add weight and see what happens. Then remove the weight and plug with a dowel and repeat in another spot to see what happens.The bait looks like hell when done but the outcome is worth it..Musky baits are a little easier to do this with due to there size and small errors in the bait design are not as critical as they would be in a bass sized lure.

No the boat is long gone years and years ago he sold it to a co-worker. I do have some pics of the boat and the build itself. He built several boats in his day and would like to build one with him and my son, three generations working together.He built these boats long before I was born and mostly with hand tools. He said his hands still hurt from all the brass screws that he screwed in by hand.

Dmirty when I was talking about useing a more dense wood for more evenly distributed weighting its still bottom heavy because of the ballast weight thats being used.Its just its not as bottom heavy as the more bouyant with ballast.With the bait that I make thats looks like the one you doing the bait has two drilled holes filled with lead ,and thats it(bait is made with oak).I have made lead ballast shaped like dowel plugs that fits the holes that ive predrilled.Those baits have a great glide and near neutral bouyancy.I have another question for you do you use a leader on your baits. This can help and hurt the action of your bait also. Sometimes the weight of the leader is enough to make a bait nose heavy and ballast is needed to compensate. The positive to the action the leader gives it will jumpstart your baits glide. With the first pull the bait will pass the leader up in the water and cause a pivot point( the leader connection to the bait) and on the second pull you are actually turning the bait slightly backwards and to the side causeing the first step in a glide. You also talked of the plastic baits that you looked at what is the density of the plastic, I bet you that ( depending on what type of plastic)its density is greater than more bouyant wood. I have been useing alumilite and its density is great than water and has a nice slow sink to it.Featherlite on the other hand wants to float.

dmitry what kind of wood are you useing. From the looks of how much ballest you are useing it must be a very bouyant. I make a glider very close to your shape, but i find you need to use a more dense wood to get a good glide.The problem you get is when useing a bouyant wood is you have to use so much lead to get the bait to sink it kills the action.I use oak and maple for my gliders and the weight of the bait is more distributed throughout the whole bait, and the ballast is used to make the bait slowly sink and stay upright.Think of what a balsa crank does when you over load the belly with weight ,it will kill the action and it wont have a good wobble.The same goes for a glider if you overload the weight in the belly you just killed the glide. A proper shaped and weighted glider ( in my opinion )should have a natural swim to it on a staight retrieve., a wave action to it.You can take the same shape of a glider and use two different wood and get two different actions. If you take two woods one bouyant and one dense and you cut the same shape out and weight them to sink at the same rate they will weight the sameon the scale, but the difference is where the majority of the weight in the bait . More bouyant baits are going to be bottom heavy and the the more dense woods weight is more evenly distibuted throughout the whole bait and thats what makes the difference.

Diemai this was fantastic, I will have to try this hinge out.

Diemai my dad built the sunfish model back in the 1960s.Its a nice basic boat I'll try and find a pic and post it.

Good work John, your bait looks great.There is nothing like the satisfaction you get from finally getting it right.I cant what to see bait #2.

If there is any fabric outlet stores in your area or some of the larger hobby stores carry a good selection of netting material. They use them in crafts and wedding veils things like that.

My camera is not working ,but there is a pic of it in a old thread of mine called homemade tools.The rack is bolted to a flexable paint stand. I would link you to it but im lucky to know how to get on this site , so linking is out of the question. If someone could post a link it would be greatly appreciated.

I use etex and I have no problems useing it. It does take a long cure time though but to me its worth the end product.I suspend my baits in a |___| shaped rack that attaches to the dryer. Each bait has it own rack and it easier for me to do multiple baits because its one bolt to attach to the dryer instead of trying to hook the bait from the screw eyes with clear on them.You never have to touch the bait just the rackand then bolt with a bolt and wing nut. I have two dryers one large and one small. The larger dryer that will do about a hundred musky baits( never tried that many) and the smaller that will do about six.The racks do help speed up the clearing process because you can attach your bait on the wheel faster with less chance of dropping your bait .It also helps to have your better half mixing a batch of clear for the next batch of baits foryou while you are clearing larger number of baits. That way you dont have to stop and mix, you already have it ready for when you run out.

Pete I like your idea on storing the brush when not in use . Those tips are a pain sometimes when the paint dries and clogs up. Theres nothing like setting your brush down for a minute or two and then your fighting a clogged tip.Im going to try this one out, better than what Ive been doing.

Bouyancy is a very important to lure action and it does make a better bait( my opinion for certain baits). Inmy post above I was kind of answering the last question ,can you do this with lead?A person could try taking apart a rattle trap( maybe thin the sides down alitte from the head back and mold the the two halfs, then pour lead then glue the two halves together.Playing with how much lead you weight and leave hollow in the head would need experimenting with. The lure wouldnt be( in my opinion) a not so durable lure due to the thin sides but it would be neat to see if you could get a good swim.

I personally think you could make a rattle bait out of lead and a solid poly crank for the reasons stated above. The rattle bait would have very thin walls where the rattle chamber would be. Rattle baits need to be weighted more head forward to run proper.The two most action baits that sink in the musky world (first two to come to mind ) is a fuzzy duzzit and a chatterbait. These baits have high vibration and you feel every inch that it swims back to the boat. And If you can make a battleship float through engineering design anything could happen. I once seen a concrete canoe that the people from wv tech made for the conoe race on coal river.

Sinyo Its amazing there is a fine line of weight that makes a bait sink(your clear coat) and one that will slowly float to the surface. I thought your line tie was a little high also. The biggest problem when you build smaller baits is the little mistakes that you make are magnified and cause bigger problems.Smaller baits are harder to tune and im glad I musky fish , because the baits are 6 inches or better and I can get away with alot more imperfections than you can. Anyway im glad you finally got your bait running.

Stamina sold some contaners dont know if there the size you need. my buddy used to buy some from them for musky baits

Sinyo lets start over, what kind of wood is easily available to you. Need to know of few dense woods and a few more bouyant wood , and from here we all can help out on a good start. Then we can try making two baits one with the top best choices ( if you want) and see what happens.If you can print off and post a drawing of this bait so others , (maybe a few of us who has this same wood available) can help build and work in finding the best results.I think this will be a fun group project, if anyone is interested.

Pete you are the lexan man... I love the work you have done with this and the best thing is that its lighter than the others. keep testing and comming up with those ideas.

Sorry to get a little off topic but the point I was trying to make is denser wood does have some action to them, not as much as a more bouyant baits but they do have action. If you have to add so much weight to a more bouyant bait to get it to sink you have killed all the positive action thatthe bouyant bait has, thus no purpose in the more bouyant bait.If you have two of thesame baits but made of different material and they sink at the same rate, one bait isnt more bouyant as the other.The positive to me with the denser wood is that the desity is displaced throughout the whole bait instead of an anchor in the belly of a bait.Now I might be wrong in saying this I would like to here some comments. I really dont know exactly how to write this, Imight need vodkaman to help me,but the two baits are the same volume in size and it takesthe same mass to get them both to sink at the same rate. Its just one has the majority of the weight in the belly killing the action.