basswood lure hardware?

[mainbutter]

Is basswood a strong enough wood to use just screw eyes for attaching hook anchors and line ties, or do you pretty much need through-wire construction?

[BobP]

Yes. IMO, any wood except balsa is strong enough not to require thru-wire construction if we're talking bass baits.

[atrophius]

I agree with bob, I built a lot of mine with basswood and they hold just fine.

[diemai]

@ mainbutter

I set in my screw eyes with epoxy glue ,..... I'd extend the pilot holes to little less than 1/4" deep to a little more than screw eye shank dia. , ........I'd smear some glue onto the eyes shank , twist it in ,..... so a kinda "glue plug" evolves in that hole extension providing added strength(wipe off overflow) .

As far as I'm concerned , basswood is similar to abachewood(often use the latter for crankbaits) in density , and I won't have no worries about these glued eyes holding up even against the average 30" pike .

greetz , diemai:yay:

[BobP]

Diemai, I know a lot of guys like screw eyes for hook hangers but I prefer hand twisted stainless wire. First, I'm not building for sale and don't have a "time is money" consideration. It takes me about 15 minutes to twist up a set of hangers and line ties for a batch of 5 lures - a little longer if I'm installing them on the lips of medium/deep divers. Here's what I like about them: unlike screw eyes, hand twisted hangers do not have tapered shafts so they have more glue surface when installed in pre-drilled and epoxied holes. Mine are .029-.031" dia stainless which is easy to twist and you can make them any length needed, plus you can also size the eye diameter to fit the lure. The wire is much thinner than the wire in a screw eye and so less obtrusive. It's easy to mount or remove split rings from them without bending the split ring like I do on screw eyes. Lastly, I use soft temper stainless wire for line ties. Hand twisting them adds strength to the tie while leaving it maleable enough to tune the bait without damaging the nose.

[diemai]

@ BobP

Thanks for your hints , ....actually I haven't tried these twisted wire eyes before , but I see point in your arguments about them holding up well , also I like the advantage about sliding splitrings over thinner wired eyes , especially when using smaller rings on smaller lures .

Should have known years ago , ........by now I still have a stock of a couple of hundreds of different eye screws , all mailordered from the US , as they are available in Europe for only a few years now .

Anyway , I have tried homemade wire eyes , but these are a little different to the twisted ones and also more elaborate to do , ........on a nail vertically chucked in a vise I'd first bend an eye to a piece of wire , after wind one of it's shanks around the other one a few times , leaving some space inbetween each winding , so that it would virtually also look like a kinda thread of an eye screw , only a lot thicker .

These I twist in snugly into bores in the wooden lurebodies , that I had previously filled with epoxy glue .

Made a pull test on these eyes once , ......at 50 lbs. my fishing scales , that I used for pulling , got spoiled due to a sudden release , as the connecting cord snapped , ....but the eyes , though being pulled linear(aligned to their bore) , did not move a bit !

Anyway , I might give these twisted ones a go some day , really sounds easy and I could save the money for eyescrews in future , ..........how do you set them in , ......also twist them in snugly or you make the bore little larger so that you could just push the twisted shank into the hole without any friction ?

Off course the hole needs to be thoroughly filled with glue before , as only applying glue to the shank , it would wipe off again when inserting the eye and not hold up well .

greetz , diemai:yay: