aulrich

I am still doing e-tex or d2t (if I am in a rush) at this point, I am hoping a renovation contractor buddy will have some leftovers I can try at some point, I would like to see how it stands up to pike. I may be wrong but MCU seems to be very popular for the bass bait builders and musky(and by extension pike) seem to use epoxy.

If I got this right it looks like some of the bigger paint stores can have it (Benjamin Moore super spec HP) it seems to be commonly used as a hardwood floor finish.

Lookup the alumilite youtube channel that will be a decent place to start.

With both the band saw and the table saw I was planning I was thinking of some sort variant on a panel cutoff sled or tenon jig

Thanks I'll give both of those a try. And yes blanks are still square, learned that lesson at my first attempt to learn to hand make bodies, last winter. This winter's attempt is going smoother at least it is until I test that first batch of lipless that I made over the weekend.

One thing I am still struggling with is getting the slots cut properly, so lets start from here1.5mm is the thinnest I have been able to source locally, I have a band saw and with that it would be easy to get a nice accurate slot, but the kerf is closer to 1mm. I could expand it with emery board or something similar. Though I would prefer to cut the slot in one step. I think I would have to bump up to 2mm lexan if I was to try a double cut on the band saw or if I seal with epoxy will that the gap be filled in enough to reliably mount the lip. At what size of bait would you jump up to 1/8" (table saw kerf) I was personally thinking 5" and up, or can it be smaller.

I picked up a lure turner plan from that guy who had been putting on webinars lately, with his turner the lure is at 45 to the rotation, the though being the clear coat gets spread more evenly over the whole length of the lure. But the best part about it is the lure clamps and how easy it is to handle lures from painting to clear coat.

Would ballast be used if yes molded in or added after. Would you ever pour different densities of resins to act as ballast

There are no Muskie in western Canada , so hopefully my pike experience is reasonably transferable, for me a set of lures will have these colours Perch Flo yellow fire tiger Flo orange fire tiger Silver/blue Silver/black Gold/olive Gold/flo purple/ flo orange Pike ( very underrated) To date 1 coat of d2t holds up the best but nothing really last. 20-30 fish beat the tar out of most lures.

Look up Paul Adams' youtube channel, there are a number of fun beginner project and more advanced. It's a good start point at least.

At this point I am just painting pre-mades so I typically don’t paint one lure at a time, I run a batch of 8 which covers my “normal” patterns and I do my best to minimize paint changes. On small lures the process is pretty quick but the time can extend quite a bit with bigger lures. Though depending on my mood I’ll mount up a batch the night before and give them a rattle can white primer base coat. That tends to speed thing up. IIRC I have had normal batches as quick as 60 min and as long as 3-4 hours to do a batch of my big lures . But my normals are basic 3 colors , perch and a couple fire tiger variants, so very basic. Anything with spots or if I am copying a complicated bait I just stop looking at the time. Some of my pearl paints take a bunch of very thin coats to look right and that really slows me down. For me mounting hooks seems to take a unreasonable amount of time.

I got the bodies, the lip strikes me as a little fragile but we will see. The shape itself is a really nice perch imitation. locking the segments is going to be a challenge, the twist tie idea may not work I was expecting a loop to loop type connection but it is a loop to pin arrangement so it will take some trying.

I can say for sure with toothy critters like pike one coat of Etex is not enough I was very disappointed to have great chunks of topcoat and paint come off my new baits, one coat of D2T is OK. though it seem to be much easier to get wonkey thickness especially if you are like me and push pot times.

It sort of depends, wLure may be the low quality supplier, but they have more than bass baits. The higher end suppliers will have a crossover bait or two but other than that nothing really but bass baits.

I am pretty sure I just bought their reef runner clone off ebay. I won't have time to paint or use it before freeze up though.

I used an 7" Bomber Long A clone (or that is what it looks like to me) that I got from wlure. https://wlure.com/product_info.php?cPath=28_31&products_id=228, I caught lots of pike some as large as 40" on the body this summer. I probably pitched that lure style 75% of my fishing time on this summer vacation. I did have one hook hanger pull out, but that was during hook extraction and the kid was putting excessive twist on the lure. They also have a 7" deep diver as well I caught a decent number on those as well. I typically wait until the lure body is “on sale” with wlure I typically don’t buy lots big enough to get volume discount 50 of any body style is plenty

Thought about it ,and really worst comes to worst I can always re-paint I will make a bucket of too chewed to use lures. But really typically blanks are cheap enough that if I caught so many fish that the paint job is a total write off, then I got my money out of them.

Thanks for the suggestions I guess I will need wait until the bodies actually show up to figure it out but at least I have starting points. I suspect the twist tie suggestion will be the first I try since that feels like it will best dovetail with how I do things now. As for patterns silver\black silver/blue and perch will be the first of the mark, but a firetiger variant or two and gold/flo purple/flo orange will have to be made since they were so productive this year. The workshop is still invaded by waterfowl decoys so I'll post picture after freeze up. How is the concrete sealer for durability, D2T is only so/so for standing up to repeated pike, etex needs one more try but I can say for sure 1 coat is not enough.

This body has caught my attention but I am not sure how I would go about getting it done https://wlure.com/product_info.php?cPath=28_33&products_id=2869

I am a relative newbie to this hobby and what I have done was paint a lot of prefab bodies (the cheap ones from china) what I would do is try to replicate the paint jobs from the Rapala catalog some are easy some are not. The great thing about acrylic is if it does not turn out you can wipe it off and start over. The usual thing of 2 light coats is better than one heavy really applies There are a couple of good youtube channels To me it looks like you are using opaque paint (at least the black) the back shading is much easier with transparent black or shading grey. I like the body where did you get it from.

Making a clone of these has been on my radar , though I was thinking the best way for a homer to do these lures id to make a mold of them and cast them out of a clear resin.

My generalist nature says play with both, that is what I have done, but I am not carving much yet, I have made lots of dust and fire wood so far carving , but I have been having a blast painting pre-made blanks. To my mind with , hard lures there are two skills making the body and painting the body. With a lure blanks if you mess up the paint job you can always just wipe it off(though you can melt a body if your heat setting the paint with a heat gun). Right now I am in “fill the tackle box mode” and I have never had so much gear with my lipless blanks I am working on getting one of every color in the rapala catalog. I am a pike/walleye fisherman and most of the blanks are bass oriented, so I will have to carve to fill the gaps once I am through the standard lipless, floater minnow, jerk bait type bodies. I did have fun making molds for soft plastics but oddly I don’t use tons, more pike than walleye.

Last night I had a flash back to a "forms design" class from 20 years ago and at least to the human eye IIRC Blue with Yellow text was the clearest combination. Firetiger has been working well , I made a dark fire tiger but no takers yet on that one. Black/white is on the to do red/white oddly is on the bubble mostly because I have a clown super shad rap with no teeth marks in it.

So I was out yesterday actually using some of the lures I have been painting over the last while, with one of my sons, and unsurprisingly to us the top performer that day was yellow/red lipless. And oddly this is not the first time that has happened for us. To back up some there is a classic Canadian lure the Len Thompson 5 of diamonds spoon it’s one of those lures that most if not all Canadian fresh water hard tackle fisherman currently have or have had more than one in their life. So as I show my boy the latest batch of lures I invariably get the question have you made a couple of yellow/red (yellow body red head and back) since it will either get chewed up or lost so we always need more than one. So what are your favorite color combinations where it’s not really attempting to be natural at least to our eyes

Another option for paint is the acrylic model paints , I was at the hobby store over the week end and noticed (for the first time) that the color options are much fuller they must have had 10 different “olives” , I would expect they are brush type paints so some amending would be needed to get them shootable and transparent.