Making Dancer handmade fishing lures

There are some really good tips and tricks in the video from Dancer Lures, especially lure cutting template.

A simple electric drill lathe

Of all the electric drill lathes I have seen this one is pretty simple and would be great to make some cork floats with or even the odd lure with a bit of modification

Making DIY Injection Molds For Soft Plastic Fishing Lures

In the tackle shop they are talking about the next life, this apparently is not a new online experience but reincarnation. They have covered slavery, the ‘three seats of power’ and whether the council can ban you from their premises. I unfortunately have arrived mid flow and the conversation looks to building momentum rather than waning. Paul who is sat next to me passes me the Angler’s Mail to show a giant pike that was taken from a river and then goes on to tell me about his last fishing trip with another Paul and momentarily I feel like I have joined a club of Pauls.   

My visit to the tackle shop has little to do with buying anything substantial, just to pick up some bits and pieces, wire crimps, swivels and whatever shiny bits take my fancy. By the time the shop owner has called for a time out in the ongoing debate my mind has been blanked by talk of the Illuminati. I buy some things and leave them to their talk; well at least it has killed some time while my video uploads.

Making A flying Minnow Lure and fishing with Dave

There is a pike on the edge of the reeds, when everything settles it lunges scattering the fry that hold up in the shade. I have been through every lure in my bag casting and retrieving them as close the stems as I dare but none so far have sparked any interest. Paul a fellow angler spots me and comes over for a chat, eyeing up his brace of rods and bite indicators set up a little way down the bank I ask if he has gone over to the carp side. He tells me he has always been a carp guy and only fishes the float for roach and bream when he has not had much luck with the big fellas, which he says is more often than he would like. 

The carp here can get to just under the thirty pound mark but they have seen it all, every rig, bait and trick in the book and while getting fat they have learnt to avoid spending any time out of the water.  So we talk about baits and he tells me about one of his friends who used a chicken Macnugget to land a twenty pounder and the next day Paul had been through the drive-in hoping to repeat his friend’s success. Talking weird baits and strange catches is a vast subject, I throw in a couple of tales including the story of the terrapin catch I had made on pellets; the non-native terrapin had probably been released after the Ninja Turtle craze had subsided. Then I tell him about Dave taking a pike on a mussel while float fishing for tench; a fish so ugly it would not be considered pretty if it was amphibian. 

It is a little over ten minutes later when Dave arrives as if summoned by the mere discussion of his fishing exploits. To say Dave is an unorthodox fisherman would not quiet convey the distance he has travelled either by design or folly from the main practices of the modern coarse angler. This evening he has two rods, the first is a fly rod fitted with a fixed spool reel to which is attached an unspecified monofilament line, a cage feeder, a hook length of 1.5lb and a size twenty hook, with this set up he hopes to land something. His other rod as if to balance things out is a straight piking, dead bait set up with a bubble float. As he has carried both rods from his house, broken down with the rigs attached and has not brought his glasses the task is given to me to untangle the treble hooks from the feeder and the rod rings; Dave helps by holding his can of beer steady.

I tell him about the topic of our earlier discussion which encourages him to share his own little gems including his story about catching the same catfish in a Thai lake as Jeremy Wade of River Monsters fame.  He has lived probably a little longer than the biggest carp in the lake and has seen almost as much but listening can be a bit of guessing game. Dave’s ability to communicate is based largely on the powers of his audience to fill in the bits of his sentence’s that are missing or edit out the bits that have been added by mistake. Sometimes if my concentration dips or Dave breaks his monologue by swigging from the can that he has been using as a microphone I am left with the feeling that I have been eating pasta without the sauce.

The light is falling and Paul asks me if I am still selling lures, and I tell him about the videos and people making them themselves. I tell him about the guys who have made lures from my designs and send me pictures from Australia, and South America of fish and places to fish, we talk for while as the drunks on the far side of the lake laugh into the darkness and the rats scuttle.  

A Baramundi on a Phox Minnow made in Australia by  Roy Priestley, thanks for sending the image Roy

Making Soft plastic Fishing Lures

A very bad fisherman

    When the pike hit the lure I did what I have been telling myself I shouldn’t do, instead of striking and setting the hook I reached for the button on my camera. The pike needless to say was camera shy and just as I got the video going it threw the hook and buggered off to recover. I gave a few more casts just in case it was having second thoughts but I guessed it had better things to do. Well this was my first outing with my new Sushi Whip Tailed Grubs, I hadn’t actually caught a fish but at least I had proved to myself that it had attracted or annoyed one enough for it to take a swing at it.

                Despite being five in the morning other anglers had begun to arrive and my open water was quickly reduced to small patch which felt only a little larger than the bath tub I had tested the lures in. Before long I was into something again and this time I managed to strike. Whatever was on the end of the line shot off stripping line from reel as the drag buzzed. Despite thudding away at my rod I was not convinced it was a pike, I thought maybe it was one of the fabled catfish or a foul hooked carp.  A few mutes later I was gaining on it and the back end of a very large eel emerged from the weeds.  

I suppose an eel foul hooked doesn’t count unless you are a really bad fisherman. The only compensation was that I didn’t have to get my forceps down its mouth to unhook it.  

Making a Beetle Fishing Lure From Plastic Spoons

I am not sure this lure project really made sense until I added water and then when a pair of eyes swam towards the camera I knew it had that spark.  The plastic spoon lure was an idea I had, had a long while ago and never got to building; mainly because I knew I could make the beetle part but I had no clue how to turn it into a lure. In the end I made the beetle last week and after working over the weekend in the city at the river festival, I came back to it with a plan. Rather just create another wobbler I thought about a drop shot rig which I have been using for pike in the winter when they tend to sit in the mud. As always I am a few seasons behind with my lure making but when weed dies back I should be able to bounce this baby a foot or so off the bottom without the constant fear of losing it. 

el Dorado ............ Golden Dorado

La mejor manera de cubrir un señuelo de pesca son las marcas dejadas por un par de dientes afilados. Gracias a Cholex1000 que me envió un link a un vídeo que ha hecho de su primera pesca de madera señuelos. Ahora quiero vivir en Argentina y para pescar el Dorado (Golden Dorado). Gracias por el video         Google Translate


The best pattern to cover a fishing lure with are the marks left by a pair of sharp teeth. Thanks to Cholex1000 who sent me a link to a video he has made of his first wooden fishing lures. Now I want to live in Argentina and to fish for el Dorado (Golden Dorado).  Thanks for the video

Drinks Can Vibe Lure

I often start a lure project with a big idea and then try to bolt ahead to the finish without paying too much attention to the details. This is great for quick prototypes but almost useless if I want them to last longer than a few chucks into pond. So this vibe lure is about the details for me, the real lure or big idea I want to make is a swimbait with a polycarbonate core but my main experience with polycarbonate comes from making minnow lips rather than anything structural.  Using polycarbonate as the lure body has put me on a really steep learning curve. It is an unbelievably strong material with a high impact resistance but a bit of a pain in the arse to drill and needs a bit of work to bring the edges up to a shine.

 Using the drinks can was something I thought about for a while; normally aluminium cans are coated internally with varnish which makes for a better surface for the glue to bond to than aluminium. Having pre-coloured and protected finishes also saves a bit of time.  So this was a bit of fun which really worked on the canal perch even if I didn’t catch anything bigger than a handful I mean a finger full. 

link to template

Turning An Old School Fishing Lure On The Lathe

Image Above: The Fat Head Wiggler

I went a bit mad with the power tools and finally dusted off the lathe to make my own take on that old school classic ‘the wiggler’. I suppose my next project should be an earlier lure maybe something made from bone with its origins in the Stone Age. What interests me about these types of lures is their birth within that period when mass production was making products affordable or at least within reach of  ordinary working people.  These are lures born out a machine both in terms of design and production; they don’t look like anything I have ever seen swimming in a lake but then not a lot of lures do.

  

  The decal on the side was something from my school days when hip-hop was just emerging and I spent all my free periods at school drawing graffiti in the back pages of my school books while wishing I lived in New York and had a posse. At the time one of my school friends owned the biggest Ghetto Blaster in Liverpool which used about the same amount of battery power as electric outboard and required its own seating on the buses, despite its size it did nothing to help us to become cool. I was truly un-gifted as a break dancer but it didn't stop me putting on displays at family weddings which I am still try to live down. Thankfully I have now reached an age were rap music has become noise and I no longer dance at weddings. 

  Fat Head Wiggler Fishing Lure Template by Paul Adams

  Fat Head Wiggler fishing lure Materials List by Paul Adams

How To Make A Balsa Crankbait Part 2

I took my little crankbaits for a testing session at one of my favorite lakes, what I hadn’t figured was that while I have been away from fishing the rain has also managed to hold off and the lake had shrunk a little. Not being a very deep lake to start with its shallow margins which reach a way out into the lake had become very shallow; down to inches in places. The cold had also kept the weed growth down leaving any would be pike practically naked if it had chosen to leave deeper water.

Well it was water and water is a good place to test lures. The crankbaits surprised me casting cleanly with only the occasional tumble and reaching distances I had not expected. Even as the wind began gusting enough to push up some waves I had no problems cutting in. The retrieve really threw up some god vibrations although the waves made it a little hard to check out the action and once again they ran straight out of the box without any tuning.  Despite the obvious lack of fish I was happy, well who wouldn't be stood in water holding a fishing rod and casting homemade lures. I hung around for stupidly long period of time before realizing I could safely walk out in my wellington boots and nearly reach the distance of casts. 

How to make a Flying C Spinner

Image Above: The Flying C, another DIY project
Image Right: Balfour Bay, Erraid, Mull, Scotland

With my Pneumonia on the wane and the snowman who has stood guard over the garden for the last week starting to suffer from erectile dysfunction it seems only fair that I should be going on a little trip. Hopefully next week I will be sat in a cottage just back from a Hebridean  beach with a view over to the sea cliffs of the Burg, and if the mood takes me I may venture down to throw some lures or visit the local freshwater loch to test my new Flying C spinners on the local trout.

  Flying C Diagram and Blade Templates

  Tools and Materials List for the Flying C Fishing Lure

x-rays

A few of the classics given the CAD treatment, Crank Bait, Deep Diving Crank, Stick Bait and Wiggler

The X-rays came back this morning and the diagnosis was better than I expected; it seems I am not going to die just yet but I have managed to get a good dose of pneumonia. In the delirium of the warm waiting room I imagined the doctor placing the x-ray on the light box and telling me that the problem was I had the bone structure of a fish. So I have been in bed for what seems like an eternity designing some new lures and drawing up some classics I haven’t the energy to build, but most of all dreaming of fishing and deep pools of water. Bed sores aside I have now accumulated a long list of ideas for new videos for when I recover and then hopefully I will be busy long enough to fill out an average lifespan.

I will be back soon…

How To Make A Simple Wooden Lure

I padded off down to the lake this afternoon to try out the paint brush handle before the water had a chance to freeze up again. I briefly had the place to myself and threw the new lure without my usual restraint, it flew like a rocket. The hardwood and rear weights kept it on course enabling me to place it rather than hurl it and hope for the best. With the rod tip lowered and a steady jerk on the retrieve I could keep it subsurface gliding and bucking with its silver sides flashing.  I slowed my retrieve and added long pauses so it sank to the bottom and kept some depth. In among the jerks I felt the rumble of a fish but it had gone after putting a couple of bends in the rod. I cast again and again while trying to remember the sequence of tugs and pauses that had triggered the attack. In the end I contented myself with the thought that it would have all been too much to catch a pike on the lure’s first outing, especially in the middle of winter: it didn't stop me vainly casting along the same stretch of water.

When the Essex boys turned up I switched to a lighter drop shot rig and a soft plastic fearing the water would quickly be covered by a web of carp lines.  Moving out of the way while they set up I threw jellies along the reeds. One of the lads asked if I had any old lures going spare so he could do a bit of spinning while waiting on his bait alarm.  I fished out a jig head with a soft plastic lure, but he didn’t seem that impressed so I gave him a Phox Minnow that I had managed to spray up in the style of a multi coloured sock. Although I give away lures a little too regularly I still get that nervous feeling that comes from handing over my work to be judged by someone else.

I moved a little further round the lake and continued my campaign to either catch a fish of freeze to death in the process. Back over the lake my Phox Minnow had claimed its first victim a small pike and I headed over while they waited for me. I waded into the shallows and unhooked it claiming it as my own as I had made the lure and was having no luck myself. I wandered back to the reeds and gave a few half-hearted casts before deciding that despite Christmas winter on the whole is crap, so I packed up and headed home. 

Mackerel Feather Rigs Revisited

I have been back over some old ground, creating some more mackerel rig videos but I felt the original needed some improvements. Hopefully the addition of new patterns and videos will make the process of tying your own a little easier and maybe I can move on to breaking some new ground or at least get out fishing.

Stop Press. 

Depressingly the Marine Stewardship Council have taken mackerel off the ‘fish to eat list’ due to the threat of overfishing to its breeding stock in the north east Atlantic. 

How to tie Mackerel feather rigs (Sabiki rigs) PT2

Homemade mackerel feathers

Image Above: Homemade Mackerel feathers

Luckily today I found an hour between transporting people on and off the island to get in a bit of boat fishing. Realising the time constraints and the fact that a swell was still breaking heavily in the sound of Iona I stayed in the shelter of Easter Island fishing a reef that runs in a line from the island’s pier out into the sound.

No bait this time just homemade feather rigs jigged off the bottom. It didn`t take to find a shoal of baby pollock and cod. I moved into deeper water in an effort to find some large fish and struck into some saithe that were just on eating size. The real reason for the trip was to test out some rigs I had bonded rather than tied and then held with no problems even after a few encounters with kelp.

I am still waiting for a good calm day to get a little further out where the big fish live and really test some homemade tackle.

Image Below: Saithe (coal fish) caught on homemade feather rigs