DoomDiver

In my opinion, through wire > Epoxy >Superglue in terms of strength. Superglue and baking soda can be plenty strong if done correctly, but from personal experience, I trust the epoxy much more to hold the hook hangers in place. The wood will fail before the epoxy bond breaks in most cases. Then you can add the super glue and baking soda to the top to fill in the imperfections and make it smooth.

A little upgrade from the last pike. I wasn't able to fish much this year but this mid 30in pike was fun in the kayak.

You could use splitshot if you don't want to melt your own lead.

Glue a piece of leather from the fabric store to a paint stick and you'll be good! I have the same knives among many others and as long as you keep them sharp with the strop and compound you'll have no issues and no need for a sharpening stone.

One of the guys I know who builds wooden musky baits commercially uses 3+inch screw eyes for his lures. These aren't jointed though. Personally I twist my own .051 wire in the 3+inch range and epoxy it in (much stronger than the bend out strength of a screw eye of the same diameter) but a jointed lure gives the fish more leverage against the screw eyes than a single piece so take that as you will. Personally I wouldn't trust a wooden door hinge joint on musky.

Definitely! Definitely a niche use IMO but given the right circumstances I think this will be the ticket for a big one.

Thanks! Hopefully this winter I can get time to real dial these in.

So after months of distractions I was finally able to finish up the supersized glide. It comes in at 10.5 inches and 7 ounces and is modeled after the first glide I made. A couple of the progress pics can be found below: Here it is featured below a 6inch bull shad. My cousin (who this is going to) wanted to have a swivel integrated right into the tow point of the lure. This way there isn't a split ring that will wear down/fail and if the swivel gets messed up it can just be cut off instead of it being useless, buried in the wood. It sports 4/0 mustad triple grip hooks and size 5 owner split rings which really makes the bait feel like a musky lure. It also has a spot for a stinger hook on the back (size 1) as he was saying sometimes the fish would just mouth the tail but didn't want to inhale the 7 inch glide I sent him. IMG_6724.MOV IMG_6725.MOV I'm going to have to revisit this at some point as I love the look of the bait but I was hoping to get a wider glide out of it. I'm sure if I had more hours throwing it I could find the right cadence to get the proper motion. On an ultra slow retrieve it looks pretty great though.

Man that has some insane waking action!

There are a lot of factors here that determine the sink rate of a bait. It depends on the specific gravity of the material and the amount of weight added. A simple way to think about specific gravity is in terms of the density of the material. Balsa has a very low specific gravity (low density) and so it floats very high on the water. Walnut has a higher specific gravity (higher density) so it won't float as well. A piece of lead has a very high specific gravity (high density) so it will sink fast. If you have a chunk of balsa and a chunk of walnut the exact same volume, you will need to add more weight to the balsa than to the walnut to get them to sink at the same rate. I don't work with resin but I do know many guys will add micro balloons to their resin to help float it. In general, casting resin will sink with nothing added to it whereas wood in general will float with nothing added to it. So in general, the same amount of weight added to the same size bait, one being wood (let's say poplar) and the other being resin without micro balloons, then the resin will sink much faster.

Leave the wood bare and add some eyes! Or paint just the belly and back and have the sides bare wood. It's only your first go at it so I wouldn't bother painting them in my opinion. The rat will get smashed regardless of paint. Typically I'll follow what everyone else above here does but I won't epoxy the connecting hardware in right away. You can do a bathtub test without it coming apart this way. Leave it unglued so you can unscrew or unpin the joint which makes it much easier to paint and more importantly, easier to put the top coat of epoxy on without gluing the to halves to each other! The last step then would be to glue the connecting wire and glue the lip in if you didn't already do that.

Looks like a solid first start. Keep at it!

Killer profile! For wakes/rats like this I've found chefchris' placement of the line tie is usually best. Just enough kick without it rolling all over the place. Add a couple screw eyes to the bait with your added weight and test it in the bathtub to see what gives you the best action. I tend to put the weight just behind the lip to act as a pivot point and leave the back unweighted but trial and error is going to be your friend here.

Good looking baits! Simple but I like them. Show us some paint jobs and the swimming action when you can.

DJ makes some killer baits man! But definitely agree if you can avoid hand sanding, I'd say it's more tedious than carving. I still have to buy one of those sanders.... The 1" belt sander and a bandsaw and a knife will get you 90% there for sure. Skip the scroll saw.

I do the same but I make a lot of musky lures too so I prefer the .051 ss lock wire to Harbor Freight's .041

I'll be putting on a seminar for catching tiny pike with "big" swimbaits if anyone is interested.

Thanks! I'm hoping the fish will too! We will see.

I found out the birch log in my garage had spalted after sitting for over a year drying so I figured I would make a 'naked' glide with it. Here's the log I processed. Found it on the side of the road by my local lake while fishing one day. The coloring was pretty interesting once I got a square blank out of it. I had to fill some voids with epoxy but it doesn't seem to have affected it. The finished product. I hate the tail but haven't had time to learn to make urethane ones yet. One day.... = I've since learned the optimal retrieval speed to get a nice wide glide but it works pretty well fast or slow I think. Next one will be better balanced to focus on the slow methodical wide glide. BirchGlide1.mp4 BirchGlideSpeed.mp4

Yea and I didn't account for the thickness with this one unfortunately. I pinned the joints instead of doing a double loop connection so the slots where the loops go got gummed up with the epoxy so it isn't as free as it could be. I wanted really clean joints but next time I'll make sure they're open more to allow for more freedom. What topcoat do you use? I've found lots of the dipped ones don't seem to hold up as well as the two part epoxy.

Thanks Dan! I've come a long way since this paint job too so I'm excited for the next one. Should be much better!

A couple pictures from my first multi-jointed bait. The action was much better before the clear coat but I learned a lot from this build! This has been done for months now but only just got open water to get a video of the action. BluegillSwimbait1.mp4 20200401_165806.mp4

Followup from my cousin: He ended up catching 7 decent sized bass on the glide the other weekend! Super happy with these results!

You're doing God's work here my friend! Keep us posted. Always looking for other alternatives but unfortunately don't have the time/money/space to try them all.

This is actually incredible. Really well done. I'm not jealous at all.... Do you have a link to the motor? Or does it really cost $300 for one of those? A bit steep for me but if you're making 12 plugs at a time I can imagine it's worth it.