I have been playing around with various aspects of lure building. The hobby is like crack you just can't get enough. For me it was a way to leverage the basic wood working tools I had. But like I said it can snowball. I started with open pour molds and soft plastics and painting blanks. I had mixed results with the soft plastics but they did catch fish, but if you do soft plastics you should make your own jigs too More on that later.
Painting lure blanks is lots of fun, there are tons of blanks out there. you will need an airbrush and a decent one at that but not much else. at one point i figure that a lure cost me about 2$ and that was with higher end hooks and split rings.
Then for a while I was building the bodies, that was hit and miss mostly because of my lack of patients, but I did make some that did work. along the way I added a lathe mostly to make plugs for surf fishing when the wife and I are in Mexico on vacation.
For the same reason I got myself my first lead mold and started pouring jigging spoons, did not catch anything with them in Mexico, but they worked like a hot damn on salmon, when I went and did the Moutcha bay kayak derby.
Since then I added a swim bait jig mold which got me back into soft plastics but instead of top pour I have injection molds, since I last stop doing soft plastics some more cost effective molds have come out. Also there is nothing stopping you from making your own mold. right now I am in the process of making a stonefly soft plastic , thinking a guy could bounce it down the bow and catch some trout.
Making your own means making stuff to your specifications, not more wimpy glow jigs
I want nuclear
Will trade lath time for perch fishing
, sundance post a pic of an example of what you are looking for.
Lure Makers
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