"The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope." John Buchan

Friday, April 13, 2012

April's Creations

So with the weather still preventing another fishing trip or work keeping us busy when the weather has a relapse I've found myself aspiring to make more new fishing trinkets that all still have yet to be well tried out.  Really this all started when Cabelas discontinued their wobble head jig mold...  Had that not happened I think a lot of what we have stressed over in choosing the next best mold and how to best use it would not have happened.  Well, to be fair, it probably would have happened still just maybe at a later date... ;)

So where am I going with all of this?  Well, when Jason found the Spinner Body mold he got for Christmas I had also found another mold called the SWM mold.  It was less versital then the one Jason found but offered a closer to finished product in terms of how it molds the lead.  After using Jason's mold a number of times (Thanks Jason!) and hand hammering the bodies into flat shapes and adding a curve to give wobble in the water I learned a few negatives with Jason's mold.  One is that due to us using powder paint, which requires an 350 degree 20 minute oven bake, the heat of the paint bake relaxes the lead enough that the natural spring of the stainless wire unbends some of the curve you put into it after you hammer it flat.  You can over exaggerate the bend to start with to offset this but it's less precise.  Also we learn that powder paint doesn't like to be bent much.  If you bend it after you bake it it does not fall off but you get crack lines in the paint and that a detail that eats at me... :\  However after our first trip this year it was clear that the amount of bend needed for good action in the water isn't too much so I'm probably making too much of a deal about this.

Well April brought birthday 39 for me and I had my set of wish lists already populated on my favorite fishing supply shop.  So I sat the wife down one day and surprised her with my organized greed.  I think she was just pleased that I had a list of things for her this time around.  So part of my list contents was a SWM mold and a set of eagle claw hooks to go with it (they are a custom hook for this mold if you use it as it was designed).  My plans for the mold was to modify it so that I could run stainless wire through it instead of a hook and use it to make tail spinners with it.  The pack of 100 hooks was to also try it out for what it was designed for.


If you look close at the above picture you can see a vertical line that goes off the "eye" socket for the hook.  Then just to the right inline with the flow of the lure body chamber is another line leaving the "eye" socket that I filed in.  This lets me run stainless wire through the hole mold, cast the lead and then form the loops and add beads, blades and a hook to make spinners.


I've got 3 new paint colors shown in this picture too.  New Penny, Aliwive, and Pink Perl.  All were also run through silver holographic glitter for a top coat to add more luster.

I also had a thought as I was writing up this blog entry that I might want to try turning the lure body around as it is in the spinner.  Meaning have the tie off loop at the wider heavier end and then let the narrow slender part be where the spinner blade, bead and hook stem from.  Might be worth a demo build or two just to try out for a future trip...

Anyway here are some of the setups I did with the 100 hooks I got for this mold that make the lure as intended.


Well that's about all for this post.  I'm eager to give this a try and continue trying out the previous batches of creations too.