Anyway the focus of this post isn't to cover the soft plastics work, as that's still a work in progress due to both CSCoatings not having a true red or any form of purple and all stores that should stock these missing colors from Spike-It (in unscented) are out of stock. So more will come on the dye topic later, though early results are very promising, very promising indeed! So the topic of report for now is my first pass at making a rendition of what TubeDude has been calling his "No-Name" lures.
There were two versions of the many that he showed me that I key'ed in on. Both use the same lure body which is flattened and then given some curve so that on a free drop a flutter effect will take place. Also if the lure is jigged it will give some erratic/wobble motion to the lure. For the tail blade, where the differences are, one allowing the tail blade to spin fully around behind the lure body and before the hook and the other locking the tail blade into the same loop as hook. The first lets you cast and have the tail blade spin around as you retrieve. The curve of the body should give some side to side wobble as the lure is retrieved as well. Jigging with this one should still give reasonable action. The second with the tail blade locked into the wire loop with the hook will not let the blade spin around but should help accentuate the side to side wobble of the lure as you retrieve it. Jigging will again give nice motion and flash.
Here are a set of pictures from my first tries at making these. There are already some lessons learned. First is that with powder paint it is important to bend the lure body before painting. We tried to bend it after the cure baking and that worked but on some paints that we have mixed glitter into I cracked the paint. That's more of a cosmetic issue since the powder paint does such a good job holding onto the lead itself, but it still bugged me that it happened. So that's worth keeping in mind. Next lesson was more around baking them. You need something like a length of bailing wire that you can slide the lure bodies via their wire loop eye onto as well as the blades so that you can cure bake them before you put them together. This is less critical on the version with the blade locked into the loop with the hook, but much more important on the spinning blade version. You don't want the paint to get onto the blade wire or beads to inhibit the motion. Anyway here are the pics, though I've still not figured out how to do better lighting to get the colors to come through well.
