DGagner

I'm afraid you are probably right. I'm finding out that I seem to be making lures for the fun of it now, trying new artistic avenues. When I put them in the water it seems to be more the movement that makes them work not the paint job. I started trying out lures with just the white base coat on them (no eyes yet) to cast/troll them to really see if the movement was going to be good before I put the paint on. They seem to catch fish. Some of them better than others but I've decided that if I have a white one that works better than another white one it's the particular wiggle that seems to be the factor. Sigh..... shouldn't be but I think it is.....

The scales are usually put on when you paint the main colors right after the white base coat. Often only with one color. You can keep adding by color layering them.. i.e. on that bait you made you could do the yellow and green in one screen coat. When you do this though it sometimes lifts the previous color off in places but if careful it doesn't. One thing that really looks nice if if you put a layer of silver then paint colors with screen over it using transparent or fluorescent paint. The silver still comes through under it. Nice looking crankbait btw. I wouldn't mess this one up by painting scales on it now. Wait till the next one.

And the fish is thinking..... nope that's not my shade of bone... nope not that one.... nope..... nope..... nope.... Ah! I've found it!... STRIKE! Does anyone ever really wonder about us sometime?

Got it.. thanks. I thought so but wasn't sure from the picture. I think I'll attempt one.

I'm interested in the construction of the hinge joint in a blackdog shellcracker. It's been around for awhile but I've never seen one. Does anyone have one and can show or tell me the mechanics of it? In this picture it looks like the front half is solidly embedded and the rear half has an recessed embedded joint.

I think I saw an episode of the engineered angler on youtube where he embeded a front ridge of aluminum and it had small holed drilled all along the length to have the line tie at several points. usually this stuff is done with cast lures. Not easy with wood. Unless you use hardwood, which would come close to resin density, it tears out easily. Just before this I had made one in pine but abandoned it for maple because I had that problem.

Well, I did something I'd been thinking about for awhile. I built a lure to test lures. I call it convertible because it has interchangeable parts sort of like Mr. Potato Head. You can change bill, line tie locations, weights and their locations. The video has a short part about what it is and it's build, and later on I try it with many different configurations. My goal is to be able to try things out before I put the time in making lure. Sometimes I'll want to alter something about my bait build, make it, paint it, and find out that the variation is a bust. I've got a handful of crank baits that are some of my best artwork. They're very pretty, but behave horribly in the water. I've got some ugly ones that move like a ninja.... go figure. I don't know if this build is good or just plain weird... but here it is anyway...

Well, this is going to be a probably different suggestion but I'll throw it out anyway. When I portrait paint and want to make a flesh tone you start with a fair amount of white, mix in some yellow, a little red and a touch of blue. With that you get a flesh tone depending on the amounts you used. varying the colors you can get almost any fesh (tannish) color you want from nearly white to ebony. I would think bone is in there someplace. One thing we don't do with portraits is mix some white with brown as you only get light to dark brown in the process, and that's all it is, a shade of brown. And black is a no-no. It just ends up muddying the color. black is used for black, not for darkening colors. Here's a link to an online color mixer. You can use it to mix any colors in any combination. Try 11 parts white, 3 yellow, 1 red, and 1 blue. You'll get a bone color. Vary the yellows, reds, and blues, and you'll see you can do any shade of bone you want. When mixing paints you can use the same combinations in an airbrush and get similar results. Well, that was different!

I'm sort of guilty of designing a pretty lure then make the hardware in and around it and keep my fingers crossed. I'm learning what works and what doesn't as I make bait after bait. The site I posted does something that I can't seem to find anyplace, or at least not complete, just in pieces. The result is that most information is very vague and disjointed. I like the information because it seems to be sort of a baseline. Maybe less hit or miss bait making if I at least keep within some boundaries.

I found this German website that describes hard bait making. I put the page through the Google translation filter and it reads pretty good. I hope it translates okay for you. The interesting part starts near the bottom with step 15. It describes the effect on bait movement for weighting location, bill size/angle/shape and placement, eye loop/line placement and a bunch of other stuff and how it makes a lure dive, wobble, run straight, etc. The translated website is here.

I'm guilty of eyeballing the center line. I think I may fail the test

Doing this is a bit of an art project. Some people can only do it with a micrometer. Others can carve by eye and get it pretty good. Look down the sides and from the top and you can usually see any slight variations that need to be taken down. And, if you should mess it up. Well, it's a small chunk of wood and you can start again. After you get used to it and develop a process it only takes 20-30 minutes to go from wood to shaped bait. Since you've asked the question it seems that you are ruminating about this. Just do it and see what happens. I'll bet you'll be surprised at how good it can come out.

I see what you mean. I guess the actual placement of the lines depends on the bait. When I began making mine I've learned about how blunter nosed or wider/narrower bait behave in the water. That along with weighting, the bill, etc determine how the thing moves in the water. I guess you just make some and pay attention and see what happens. General rule for me is blunter in the front, narrower on the tail and enough weight in it so that it stays upright. And center the weight to start. Moving it back or forward affects the center of 'wobble'. Hard to define everything so stay with general rules, see what happens, then modify from there with the next ones. There are some sort of standard methods, but half the fun is making one and working with that. That being said, you'd be surprised how just freehanding it and looking down the axis by eye while cutting/sanding to get symmetry can be done quite easily. Anyway, good luck with it. I don't overthink it. Just do one and go from there.

I draw two lines with a small square across the top of the lure. Each one shows where the forward and rear taper start. Then I mark the ends by eye but you can measure, then use a plastic stencil to make the lines to the rear, and then to the back. Look for videos on a youtube site called 'marling baits' he does this in almost all his builds. You can learn lots of other stuff too.

I really don't know as I've never done this in my limited experience but I was wondering if you used some transparent paint. I do know that it allows the underlying color to show through if you paint over another color. I often use a transparent color over silver paint. It works pretty good. So, for example, transparent blue over a lure I just painted with silver paint looks like blue silver, if that makes any sense.

My first calculator was a TI... My neighbor was in college engineering. He came over to my house and if we bought two of them we could get them for $150. Amazing. Did basically what a two dollar calculator from walmart does today. Although, it did have scientific notation which I later found out was indispensable with my physics classes. My math skills are pretty good. My computational skills are error ridden. The calculator saved my butt more than once. That was in 1973. I got rid of the calculator just about five years ago. It was still working if plugged in. The batteries wouldn't charge any longer. First computer in 1978 Radio shack model 1.

Thnx. Novel idea, moving the beam. All the picts worked so I was able to see exactly what you were getting at. When I taught science we used to make something similar to what I made with plastic soda straws, cardboard, pins and a glue gun. They weren't to durable but they actually worked. We had ohaus balances that we also used a lot but I figured the kids would find ownership in the work if they could make their own. It also gave a more complete understanding of mass vs weight. These were younger kids.

I searched for it on this forum and couldn't find it. You got the link? I'd like to see it. Thanks, the best solution would be to get a triple beam balance. Not that expensive but very accurate for almost any need. Still a decent one isn't as cheap as this (or as I am). It's still an option down the road. I used one at work for years, even off and on after we got the digital units. I've got this problem.... over my lifetime I find that with some things, if I didn't make it myself I don't want it. Ya, it is a problem.

Yup, another scale sort of thing. My digital scale was just not accurate. Cheap yes but boy did it have a range all over the place. I could get a more expensive one, but heck, it's just to find the weight of my lures when I make them. Coins have a pretty good standard weight defined by the US Mint. They can be used to make a fairly decently accurate scale. This is how I did it.

I've been wanting a better way to balance my hard baits instead of guessing where the center of mass is. I built a simple balance to attempt to do this. A quick build with scrap materials.

Lot's of clearcoat possibilities. From inexpensive to expensive. One really inexpensive way that works pretty good is to go to a big box store and get some 2 part epoxy.... ($5-$7), you know, the one in the syringes. Mix it up and brush it on. Be sure to get the one labeled 'clear'. or it might dry yellow. You'd have enough to do a few lures with that. There are lots of other choices too but they would probably be more expensive.