Monday, November 12, 2012

To make your own fishing lures, start with an old tablespoon or teaspoon. I stress old because if you filch a good spoon from the family silver set, someone’s going to be in trouble — although a silver-plated spoon would work well.Next, use a hacksaw to cut off the handle close to the spoon bowl, and file the cut end smooth. Then make a long, narrow lure from the handle by cutting it to a suitable length. Drill a one-sixteenth-inch hole near both ends of the spoon and the handle. After drilling the handle lure, add a slight twist so it will wobble, imitating a minnow.
For each lure, slip a split ring through all four holes. Split rings, swivels and hooks can be bought anywhere fishing lures are sold. At the tip end of the spoon and the narrow part of the handle, slide a swivel through the ring. At the other end of both, slide your choice of hooks through the ring. Attach the hooks using needle-nose pliers to avoid hooking your fingers.
If you paint one side of the lure with high-quality gloss paint, it will produce contrasting colors when the lure rotates in the water. Paint the lure long before you plan to use it so there will be no paint odor.
When you catch a really large fish, be sure to casually mention to anyone nearby that you caught that monster with a spoon!

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

GOOD TIP

Where possible try to use white cedar wood for forming your lure bodies. White cedar is a light and strong wood that holds up well in water. Red cedar or other similar woods can be substituted if white cedar is not available.

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Simple Spinner Bait

The last and hardest to construct involves elements of both previous pieces of fishing equipment. The Spinner-Bait starts like the Top-Water Lure and is the same up to after it is carved out. Now cut a spoon as with the spoon lure but dont drill holes at the end. Rather drill a hole in the middle. Now take an eye screw and use it to attach the spoon to the scalloped end of the lure by screwing it through the hole in the spoon into the lure with the rounded side of the spoon facing and fitting snuggly into that scalloped groove. Paint all surfaces to your own design. Now screw an eye screw into the other end and attach a trebble hook with a split ring. This unique architecture gives The jitterbug lure an attractive jittering motion as it is reeled through the water as well as its name.

Simple Spoon Lure

This lure is made using one spoon, two split rings, a trebble hook, your paints and some of the other tools we listed earlier. Securing the spoon in a vice, saw the handle off as close to the spoon as possible. Adjusting the spoon in the vice, first drill a hole in one end with an 1/8 inch of spoon left at the end to spare, then do likewise to the other end. Using the metal file, file off the rough edges of the sawed end of the spoon until smooth and round. Paint the spoon only on the rounded side, leaving the other side to shine in the water when used; this attracts the fish. Attach split rings at each end. Attach a trebble hook to the split ring at the larger end of the spoon only

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Fishing Lure Making & Design - Eye Spots

 To make fishing lures that actually catch fish, you need to have a strong understanding of response triggers. A response trigger is a fishing lure characteristic that makes a predator feel compelled to strike at it. Although there are many opinions among fishing lure makers about which response triggers actually work, there is general agreement about the effectiveness of one trigger in particular - the "eye spot" (a.k.a "eyespots"). The eye spot is considered one of the single most effective triggers on a lure.
Research has shown that virtually all predator/prey relationships involve some sort of exchange of eye responses (such as making or avoiding eye contact) that sets the social order among species. Over time, the predator and prey species learn to interpret the intentions of each other by monitoring these physiological eye responses and reacting to them accordingly. For instance, a predator fish's pupils will typically get extremely small at the moment of attack while the target prey species' pupils will get very large at the same instant. Knowing that the predator fish expects its prey's pupils to rapidly dilate during the attack helps us, as luremakers, to design fishing lures that mimic this behavior and thus provide better strike triggers for the fish we are targeting. Likewise, knowing that a very small pupil is an aggressive sign that a fish is about to strike tells us we should avoid making eye spots with very small pupils because that could actually scare our target fish away!
In addition to the pupil sizes, the position of the eye in relation to the axis of the body also helps the predator anticipate the direction that the prey fish will go when it flees. Predator fish will watch the eyes of their prey and then gauge their angle of attack based on the direction the eye is facing and the level of dilation of the pupil. When the pupil gets big, it signals that the prey fish is about to flee, and the predator fish will attack at an angle that intercepts the prey fish. When you're designing lures, the pupil should always be facing in the direction of the line tie so the predator fish can anticipate the forward movement of your lure as you retrieve it and make contact with the hook during the strike.
Fishing Lure Making Tips for Eye Spots- The pupil should be large on your lures in comparison to the overall eye (see "Prey" image above)
- If you're making an eye with only one color (a single dot), the eye spot should be darker than the lure's surrounding body color
- The pupil should always face in the direction that the lure travels during retreive (on typical lures, it should face the line tie)
- The eye boundaries should be crisp and well contrasted against the lure's body color

Painting Clean Eye Spots on Lures
There are many different techniques for adding eyes to fishing lures, including stickers, stencils, brushes, and countless other techniques. Without dismissing the value of these other approaches, my personal favorite is the common "nail dropping" technique. With this technique, you literally "drop" a small dot of paint from the flat end of a nail onto the lure's surface and allow it to spread out into a perfect circle and dry. During this process, you must take care to prevent the nail from actually touching the lure...the only thing that should touch the lure is the paint! Use different size nail heads to create eye spots of different diameters and allow the paint to dry between drops.