RiverSmallieGuy

If you have fished them for long enough, and you beat the paint of of them, you could simply repaint it. I also think that the Salmo's are made from some kind of foam, so you could mold one and make your own. You wouldn't be able to sell them, of course, but you could make them for yourself.

good point

I know. Absolute originality. I have no clue if anybody sells blanks, so that was what I had to say...

You may want to consider what kind of fish you are fishing for with your lures to determine wire thickness for hardware, to ensure durability and suitability.

If you want, you could simply buy Salmo Hornets and remove the paint and paint it yourself.

That's actually a very good idea, I tend to just eyeball it real good and then just scale all of the details to where it is on the other side. I try to make it look as symmetrical as possible, with my eyeballs, of course haha.

And when I am talking about your lip being straight, I am not referring to your lip being centered. I am referring to your lip slot being cut perpendicular to the center line of the bait. Think about the vortices that your lip creates, and if your lip is asymmetrical when it comes to the perpendicular aspect of it, it will be asymmetrical vortices which would in turn cause your lure to blow out. Think about making both sides of the lip and the lip slot the same.

What I would say, from personal experience, is that you may want to check your lip slot to see how straight it is. If your lip isn't straight, your lure will not work. If you look at your lure and your lip isn't straight, you can shave down the side of the lip that is closer to the nose of the lure to get a decent wobble. Ideally, you would take your time to ensure that your lip is perfectly straight. You can always widen your slot and tweak the lip.

Is that a modified tool that you use for marking out the eye sockets?

Ohhh okay. Makes sense at that point.

Makes sense. Other words, weight far in the tail will result in more drag and more freedom in the head to snap from side to side and get it to walk nice and wide. Also, what I am gathering from this is to simply put enough weight in the tail to get it to sit upright and maybe a little bit more just a bit farther toward the head than the first hole for stability.

I, like most of you guys, can appreciate the artistic touch that carved gills give a lure. Most of us have our own techniques for carving, though. I decided to post a topic asking everybody on here what gill carving tips that they have for those of us who are looking for a new technique to up our game. I have a few myself, though, which are these: 1. When you are carving very complicated gills, you should carve on little piece of it at a time on one side, then do that same part on the other side so that you don't forget what you did, especially if it looks good. Another one is simply take your time while scoring your lines. One final tip that I have is that if you want a lot of gill protrusion, sketch out your gill outline and drill your eye socket before you carve the chamfers and leave all of the material there on the gills to work with.

Generally, on a store bought ABS plastic lure you need to pop the eyes off and then you can use something like 120-220 grit sandpaper and sand it off. Or, you can. file it off, but generally a file would be too coarse and harm the lure. Unless it's like a micro-file.

dude, as I was reading what you said in your first paragraph about topwater, that is great insight on topwaters... Thank you. but how do you minimize forward progress of the bait but maximize it's width of walk?

I am still going to carve detailed gills and if I feel super fancy I may carve scales. I am 100% NOT using cedar or pine for this. Basswood is so much better for gill carvings. Basswood is among the best carving woods, and it is very light, which lends itself to baits like this. And yes, smallmouth are generally going to use the best available cover in their pool, walking baits, flukes, small swimbaits, jigs, ned rigs, it doesn't matter a whole lot. Smallmouth, like all bass, are very opportunistic, so they will take a shot at whatever you're presenting... If they want to, of course...