Happy New Year !!!!

I hope everyone has a very safe, happy, healthy and prosperous 2010.

May your string get stretched more often, by bigger fish, than it has in any year in the past.

Last batch for 2009

Some ERC double D's and a Hellhound fresh off the drying wheel.







The tails are all painted and clear coated, too.



All the parts ready for final assembly.










Completed and just hanging out waiting to be shipped out to their new owners.

Another Step Closer

After I got the first batch of bodies on the drying wheel with the first of two coats of E-Tex on them. I spent a little time pouring the tails for them. Here's a tray with several of the tail hooks and some various other trailers. These tail hooks will go into the paint room where they will be painted to match the bodies, not only will the pattern be matched but also the colors, right down to the same glitter in the clear coat.

Double D's and Hellhounds

Here's a small batch of Hellhounds and Double D's I'm starting to work on.

These will be an assortment of colors and patterns when finished.

After I get these painted and on the drying wheel I'll pour the custom tail hooks for each one and then paint them to match. I'll add a few photos of the tails in a later post.
You can see a couple of the tails that I already had poured, in the photos, along with a few 5" swimbaits left over from the last painting session.









Here they are with a base color of color on some of them.

Finished with the Paint

The painting is complete and I'll let them cure good before applying the epoxy top coat.

The first new 2010 model

Here's the first of my new designs for 2010.

I call this a Fat Shad due to it's chubby shape. It's 5"size fits nicely between a standard 4" and 6" shad bodies and provides a much larger, shad shape profile, than my other 5" swimbaits.

It will be available in several different hook size options including, the body only with no hook.

The hook shown is a weedless Mustad 8/0 ultrapoint.

The color shown is Super Sucker, which contains a lot of iridescent colors and will change it's look depending on the angle it is viewed from.

Custom Medussa's

Some photos of a couple Medussa's I painted recently.
The one on the left is painted in a custom Emerald Shiner color.
The right one is a Tulibee.

One more finished

Here's another one of the spinnerbaits I started several days ago.
This one is black & silver flashabou with a red blade with silver holographic scales.

Colors - Mild to Wild

A few random photos of some new and/or unique colors.


Some 5" swimbaits,


Orange & Chartreuse Tiger
Super Sucker
Funky sucker









(3) Psycho Firetiger










An assortment of swimbait styles in a Emerald Shiner color.

Building a center weighted bucktail

I started building me a few new center weighted bucktails, so I thought I would post a few photos to show how I make them. There are lots of ways to make bucktails and this is but one of the ways I make mine.
First I measure and marked 4" on the .051" looped wire. 4" is about how long I wanted the back half of this bait to be. I then made a S bend in the wire just ahead of the 4" mark. The S bend will be poured inside the lead head and keeps the head from twisting and sliding on the wire. The head is what the front hook hanger will ride against so I don't want it to slip down the wire when I set the hook on a fish.
I am going to use hollow beads on the front part of the bait so the lead head will be the only weight added to it, the size of the cavity I poured was 1 ounce.

The heads are now ready to be painted and epoxied. After the painting is complete I'll add the front hook hanger and finish this part of the frame.

Making the tail assembly

The heads have been painted, 3-D eyes added along with 2 coats of epoxy.


I made the front hook hanger by pinching closed a heavy clevis, add it tothe wire in front of the head and make the connecting loop, cutting off the excess wire








Starting to tie the back section of flashabou.









Back tie is complete. Time to start tying on the bulk of the flash on the back of the lead head.

















The tail section done. Now it's time to work on the front half.

Final assembly

With the back half ready it's time to assemble the front half.

This photo shows all the parts and tools needed to put together the front part of the bucktail.
Blades- #8 magnum
Beads- 1/8" hollow
Clevises - # 8 heavy
Wire - .051 stainless
Round nose pliers
Wire cutters


Here's the completed blade assembly







Now it's time to put the two halves together.






Here's the components needed to finish this bucktail.
Blade assembly
Tail assembly
3 split rings - one #4 and two #6 triple ring
2 treble hooks - 7/0 (one with a custom trailer)
Shrink tubing - 1/4" x 1"

With the final assembly completed its ready to have the hooks sharpened.

This one ended up at around 13".

A Christmas Suprise !!!

I received some interesting information today.

It seems that one of Sweden's largest predator fishing blogs was featuring some of my lures. It was a very pleasant surprise to me that they were interested in my soft plastic baits. They posted some photos of my Big Boy swimbaits and the 5" Paddletail swimbaits along with several photos of some very nice Northern Pike that were caught on my lures within the last several months, in both Norway, Sweden and surrounding countries.

I would like to send out a big THANK YOU to them for taking their time and effort in featuring my lures on their site, I really appreciate it.

Here's the link if you would like to check it out.

http://www.fiskenyheter.se/lasblogg.php?id=9

NOTE I ran Google's translate application on the url so I could read it. I had the best results translating it from Norwegian to English, it didn't translate everything but enough of it that I could understand it.

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL !!!!

Little Guys

Here's several different colors of some little swimbaits I've been working on the last couple days.

These are 5" long and weigh just over an ounce

They have a 3/8 ounce internal weight, a 5/0 hook and 3 color custom 3-D eyes.

They are made with a very soft plastic so the tail really thrashes at even the slowest retrieve speed.

Spinnerbait Update

A little update on the spinnerbaits I started a few days ago.

The frames are painted and have gotten 2 coats of epoxy, the epoxy is cured so it's time to start assembling all the parts.
















I only had time today to finish one of them.

Here a couple pics of it assembled.


After the flashabou was tied on and the thread sealer cured, I added the swivel and blade, next came a 7/0 trailer hook and a hand poured soft plastic trailer.

All that's left to do on this one is sharpen the hooks and it's ready to go into the box.

As you can see by the photos it turned out as a pretty good sized bait, about 11" with the trailer curled up.

Erik Again

More of My Favorite Places

Todays Painting

Here's a few Paddletails and a couple Big Boy swimbaits I painted today. These are for my friend Erik and they will be sent all the way to Norway very soon.

There are a some natural colors and some bright colors.
A few of these patterns are common here in the states but some will seem very strange but they are very productive and popular colors in his country. I bet these "strange" patterns would catch fish here also, especially on many high pressured waters where the fish seem to have seen and avoid every production bait available.