How to make a wood split body fishing lure. As pr

[benniejordaan]

How to make a wood split body fishing lure.

As promised, I will outline the step by step process I use to make these lure from start to finish. I will attempt to use only the basic of equipment so everyone will be able to do this. I want to add that the lure I am making is "untested" so I don't even know how it will swim till I try it. I will however use a basic design that has worked for me as a guide.

First I am going to outline some of the materials and equipment that you will need / use.

Tools: These are the basic necessities. You really don't need that much.
Jigsaw
Files
Sander (not necessary, most can easily be done by hand which I will show. So I will not use a sander.)
Equipment for bending wire. I will use basic stuff.
bench Vice. These are cheap and will make your life so simple.
Sand paper. 38#, 200#, 800#

Materials:
Wood. The best wood to use is probably going to be:

Obeche - A soft wood with a very "organised" grain. The grain can mess you around later on when painting. Not serious though... The biggest advantage of this wood is that it is easy to work with.

Jelutong - My favourite. It is soft and has a very low SG making much easier to balance. The wood also has no grain as such to it is easier to shape, sand and drill. The wood is however still quite hardy.

American Popler: Very similar to Pine in texture. Also a great wood, fairly easy to shape, sand etc. It is also the wood most used by commercial lure builders.

Pine: Stay away from S.A. Pine. In fact just avoid Pine. Pine has soft and hard grains. While you are sanding, the soft grains sand away while the hard "winter grains" refuse to budge.

For this project, I'm going to use Jelutong. I actually need to order some as I'm out of stock. What I do it I order my wood from Country Woods in Pinetown. I normally take the smallest plank in 50mm thick they have available and ask them to rip it and plane it into pieces. I normally ask for strips 50mm square for poppers and some strips 15mm thick X 50mm wide. This usually costs me about R200. If anyone doesn't want to invest in this much wood, let me know and I'll sort you out with some.

Wire:
Depending on the size of bait you want to make and the species of fish you want to target, select the apropriate wire. Most common would be 0,9mm, 1,2mm, 1,6mm and 2mm. If any of you have a hard time getting your hand on this, give me a shout. I have 0,9mm, 1,6mm and 2mm.

There may be other stuff like double sided tape etc. but nothing major.

Edit: I also have 1,2mm wire.
[align=right]...to be continued
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[benniejordaan]

I am going to make a small spinning lure to target YF tuna off Durban. These fish generally weight 3-15kg, and I plan on using light (20Lb) tackle. The lure I'm making should in some way represent a fast moving lure that can be pulled fairly quickly.

I start with some sketches - We will discuss the shape.

Compared to the small lure you can see I have gone for a more square shaped lure (similar to that of an Onda Onde).

The basics of the lures shape: I cannot tell you what shape it should be, but try to think about what makes a lure do what it does. Think about hydrodynamics. Think about the wing on a plane. What happens when air (water) flows over an object. Think about the block in a kreepy krawly that makes it kick back and forth. There are some tutorials on the net with this sort of information.

Make a slender bodies lure like pencil baits with very little curve and the action will be dulled some what. Give it shoulders and a slender tail and the lure will kick like crazy. Over do it and you can have an untameable lure. By moving the bulky shoulders backwards or forward, you can move the centre point. Move it to far back and chances are the lure might spin. An arched back makes a lure dive. This really is a hard one, I cannot give you any hard or fast rules here but you will get to tweak it somewhat a bit later when testing it. If unsure, copy a lure - no harm in copying a lure for your own use and getting experience. Avoid making lures look exactly like fish. They seldom work! Do this in the finishing. Your lure will be powered from the front and a real fish is "rear wheel drive". The behave very differently.

 

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Profiling from the top...
Note that I have only drawn half of the lure. To ensure the lure will be symmetrical, draw a centre line then one half. Fold it in half and cut it out. This way you know the left is identical to the right. make this profile slightly longer, about 10mm so it will wrap over the ark of the back later.

 

[benniejordaan]

Fold in half a cut out.

 

[benniejordaan]

Now that I have a general design, it's off to get some timber tomorrow.

 

[benniejordaan]

Just a tip when buying wood at Country woods. Try to go in the middle of the week. If they are not busy, they won't charge for machining, otherwise it costs R40 I think.

 

[benniejordaan]

Collected my wood this morning. I ordered 14 planks 15mm thick X 50mm wide X 1m long. Total came to R275. Consider I can make around 35-40 baits from it, it works out to under R10 per lure.

I can spare a few planks - R20 each.

Edit: This is Jelutong. As you can see, no grain to mess you around.

 

[benniejordaan]

The build starts by tracing the lure pattern to the wood. 2 halves required.

 

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Cut them out with a jigsaw.

 

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Runs some sand paper or the belt sander over them to get the shape close to decent.

 

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Stick the 2 halves together with double sided tape. I have no idea what you call this tape but I get it from the hardware. It is ultra thin and the same stuff is used by ladies to keep their top over their boobs. They just pay 10 times the price of course!

 

[benniejordaan]

In the vice, use a sanding block to sand the side parallel. The idea is to get the 2 halves identical in shape... or as close as possible.

 

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Then pull them apart.

Now we can start on the wire form. It is important to do this now before you do any work on the sides. I am using 1,2mm st.st wire for this based on the size of the lure.

1 - make the belly hook hanger first.
2 - Mark and bend up the other ends.

 

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Doing the wire form step by step.

Mark it out on one half of the lure.

 

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You will notice the bends at the end of the wire. They are important. They will stop the wire form from being pulled out if something big latches on.

Please stop me at any time to ask questions.

 

[benniejordaan]

Now I'm going to share something that will make your life soooo easy. I have never seen a lure builder use this method of fitting the wire form.

1 - Lay the wire form in position on one half

2 - Lay the other half on top
3 - Now keep it together and clap it in the vice until the 2 halves touch.

4 - Now that you have an impression, you need to follow this by clamping the wire form into one half at a time to get the impression deeper. Ease it though.

This will save you at least an hour.

 

[benniejordaan]

Now remove the wire form and cut small piece of wire you can place inside the lure. This will keep the halves aligned for the next step. Using double sided tape fix the 2 halves together again.

 

[benniejordaan]

Now we can mark the top profile on the back of the lure. Remember when we drew the pattern, we drew a centre line. Make sure that centre line runs on the joint. This will ensure that your wire form is perfectly in the centre and your lure is well balanced and symmetrical.

Now we can cut this out with the jigsaw. If you battle, use a belt sander.

Use the belt sander or sanding block to sand to final shape.

 

[benniejordaan]

That's it for this week. We will continue on Monday.

 

[sardinella]

Excellent