How to make a Balsa Crankbait

Well it is a start……………………

   I finally edited together my balsa crankbait video. It feels like an age since I started messing around with this little lure and hopefully later this week I will after a long recuperation from my recent illness get a chance to throw it back in some water.  Maybe I will remember how to catch some fish but that is never guaranteed. Part two will be along soon.

  Balsa Crankbait Design and Templates

  Balsa Crankbait Tools and Materials lists

Old Red Eyes Is Back

Image Above: Balsa Crankbait Prototype, foiled and waiting for paint and epoxy

Crankbaits are as American as a certain type of pie; so it is with a bit of apprehension that I have begun messing round with my own little version of a trusted classic. Regrettably in the UK we don’t have that other American Classic to accompany the lure, freshwater bass. We do have the humble Perch and then there is always a chance that a pike may be in the market for a snack rather than a full meal. 

Why a crankbait? I was looking for a lure to work at close range on a particular type of water we seem to have a lot of in this country, old industrial canals. As man-made structures I often get the feeling when fishing them I am somehow just testing lures in an overly large bathtub and to certain extent because of that uniformity I find them very hard to read, but water is water and needs to be fished. Depth wise my local stretch is a maximum of  4’3” or 1.3m and anything from 15ft wide to double that, on the plus side it does run for 127 miles and at times it has felt like I have walked or possibly trudged every mile. Structure can be sparse with long sections of aquatic motorway hemmed in by concrete or reinforced banks. But then there can be narrow sections under bridges or turning bays for long boats, sometimes wild sections spring up with reeds and water lilies but still conforming to an engineered geometry.

To date my forays to the ‘cut’ (slang for canal) have not been particularly fruitful but then winter can bunch fish together create whole swathes of canal that are almost devoid of fish, so I make my excuses. Part of the problem has been making lures for open water fishing and expecting them to translate easily into more restricted situations, here working with short casts is the norm but not just short they also have to be a little more accurate.  

Like all bits of water that skirt urban and industrial areas the canal seems to attract  almost surrealist debris, I have found whole desktop computers with screens happily bobbing along still tethered with cables to the keyboard and hub. Supermarket trolleys are almost a staple hazard but a more common and unseen one is the plastic bag, half filled with silt they line the bottom ready to grab stray hooks and hold them until the little sack can be dragged to the bank. All inviting stuff; but then there can be sections so steeped in that Victorian past with cobble stones and brick warehousing that it would not seem out of sorts to bump into Dickens enjoying a constitutional.

I suppose I should know the basics of what makes a crankbait, but no matter how many lines I lay down on paper or re-plot on the computer the test and then the refinement comes only after I have had a good chance to throw it in some water; even then I devote more time than is healthy wondering if I should tweak it a little. So my latest crankbait balsa prototype is waiting for some coats of epoxy, paint and a lip. It’s through wire is reinforced by a brass weight so if I should find a monster or a monster plastic bag the wire will hold up. Rather than make it in two halves I have gone for the simpler slot approach with a hole for the belly weight.  It should end up about 65mm (2 1/2”) long and 10g (1/3oz) just on the light end of what my rod will cast. The shape is standard stuff but rather than taper to the tail or head I have gone for a flat sided approach to make it pump a bit more water and also simplify the design, should anyone else want to have a go at building it.

For finishes, well I have been experimenting again with resin additives and new ways of laying up foil to create some depth in the facial features.

So next comes a little more testing and the start of another How-to video with hopefully some fish catching footage or bag retrieval. 

How to Make a Balsa Lure Part One

Here goes building the Phox Minnow

Link to PDF Fig.1 Wire Template Layout

Link  to PDF Tools and Materials for Through Wire

Hopefully this is a pretty straightforward start.

Another Handful

Image Above: A morning’s work carving balsa wobblers

The coarse fishing season officially opens tomorrow; I may just have to go fishing despite the weather and the need to make lures. I spent the morning carving more balsa wobblers. I can’t say I am getting any faster despite the practice but it is beginning to feel rather natural.

Fishing For Montana

Image Above: The Montnana John Wiggler

A couple of weeks ago a fellow angler who fishes in Montana called John sent me an e-mail offering his own thoughts on fishing lures and pike and suggested I make a wobbler and lose the central treble and replace the rear with a single hook. I have had to learn to take advice it is not ability that comes naturally I prefer to make my own mistakes before seeing sense. So after initially rejecting the idea for no good reason other than it was somebody else’s, I had a little time to think.

I have on balance caught considerably more fish on single hooks than on trebles, admittedly many have been with bait, flies or as feather rigs but when it comes to lure fishing I have fallen into that trap of believing more hooks can only be  good. There is a point when I suppose a lure could carry enough hooks to be considered as a storage device in its own right rather than a piece of tackle. What are all these hooks doing they cannot all be hooked into the fish. The initial idea for multi trebles is to insure that if a predator so much as looks at the lure the chances are it is going to feel some chemically sharpened metal. Once hooked the other trebles can become a headache either damaging the fish or hooking up with other debris when the fish runs for cover. I have a fear of landing nets or should I say a combination of landing nets, fish and treble hooks. On one occasion this cocktail led almost to full scale surgery removing one hook from the fish and other from the fish and the net: I have never used so many forceps and pliers and still come away with a whole in my net.

Still one lure one hook is a big step. I use a single treble on the Hybrid casting spoons and that works well especially for avoiding weed and as I often fish with my feet in water unhooking and returning pike can be as easy as giving a gentle shake in the right direction. There is always a chance I could miss a hook up but this is not just a problem with single hooks I have lost fish on three hook lures.

I sent an e-mail back to John to let him know I would have a go at making a single hook wobbler when I got the chance.

The Testing Session.

It wasn’t pretty as my prototypes seldom are, but it was through wired and I was pleased with the way I had concealed the weight. It ran a little shallow just what I needed to deal with the summer weed growth. But the action was great a tight wiggle rather than a wobble. As a mark of respect to that other Great Montanan, Norman McClean the author of ‘A River Runs Through It’, I dressed the single hook with a bit silver flash.

Once again I found my preparation a little lacking when I hooked my first pike on the ‘Montana John’ prototype, my camera was poised but unresponsive. Holding the rod up with one hand I opened the battery compartment with the other while simultaneously remembering that the battery was still on charge as it had been all night. I put the camera down and reached for the mobile phone which also has a camera but not the best quality.

I had been ten minutes at the lake and this was my first fish all one pound of a pikeling with a single hook firmly in the side of its jaw. John was right, unhooking the fish was simple it never even left the water. I put the prototype away vowing to give it a proper coat of paint but the pikes teeth had already punctured the balsa. I took six more pike over the next three hours on various homemade lures and made numerous poor quality images with my mobile phone and all the time planning to put the Montana John into some kind of production. 

Image Below: Mobile Phone Pictures of Pike

I am getting there

Image above: Handmade spoon lures, cast in Polyurethane, through wired and weighted, covered with textured foil, airbrushed and just awaiting a coat or two of Epoxy.

  This is it, the first day of producing fishing lures that will hopefully end up for sale.  I have spent the last three weeks preparing and making enough mistakes to have probably learnt something. If I had known how hard it was going to be and how much I would have to learn I am not entirely sure I would have started down this route. That said it has been fun so far, hopefully if I can sell them I may avoid getting a proper job and spend every Monday morning at the water’s edge and the rest of the week making lures.