Musky Bait Build 2012

The Musky Bait build for this year has finally started.

It appears that we will be a man down, so Al has 80 some old baits and 20 new 10" to wrap up. We have been helping to get him caught up. Frank is in the 36 to 40 range. Tom is building 19 or 29 and I have 36 pine and trying about 30, 3/4"aspen on some drop belly, jerk, glider type baits. I haven't made any of these type before, just wanted to try a few. We will see how it works out?

We planed all of the wood down , just in case we need more baits to work with! Cut them to size, slotted the lip and copied our patterns the first day.
The blade we are using for the lip slot is a little light of an 1/8th inch, so after slotting we need to run a 1/8" drill bit thru the slot for the lips to fit. The bit follows the cut slot real well .  

The earlier preparation in lure type and lip patterns paid off at this point.
Second day in, was to locate and mark hook hanger locations, line tie and rattle chambers. Decide if you are using the eye location for rattles and or the body of the bait, along with how large to make the chamber?
Then we started drilling and cutting out the patterns, along with shaping the baits on the sander. Al still needs to shape his batch for this year.

There are a lot of mixed thoughts on rattles and a lot of good articles explaining the idea. All ideas are good , if it puts Muskies in the boat!
If you have one belief, then you are able to rationalize why the others aren't as good, you should keep an open mind . I prefer a little more of a deadened rattle verses a higher pitched one and will probably stick with one chamber in a bait.I have come to prefer the rattle in the body rather than the eye location, there is just more movement in the body area as the lure moves thru the water.

Frank and I will be using thru wire on the 10" baits, so they will need wire bent up. The rest will all be screw eyes. We will all be using 3D stick on eyes.

 I had a chance to start routing the edges on my stock pile, but need to get a 3/8" round over for the 3/4" baits. The 1/4" round over works fine on them, I just want to make the drop belly glider type a little  rounder.
I get a kick out of it at this point. The wood is taking shape and becoming a fishing lure.

We also started a propionate soak going on Al's baits from last year. We didn't want to end up trying to dip 200 baits when it came time to do this years.
You will see in the pictures we abandoned the glass jars for this. To many baits for jars. The pictures are from the second dip, we do try to cover the bucket to keep fumes down and ventilate as best as we can.
The first dip was a bit over an hour, the second a bit over a half hour. When they came out off the bucket on the second dip, they were dipped in a jar of a little thinner propionate , then hung to dry.
This is all pine wood with the exception of a small batch of aspen this year.

I did grab a 3/8" round over bit from the Depot, the 3/4" aspen are starting to look pretty cool!
Still have to sand them down and drill for screw eyes and rattles.

In case you haven't guessed by now, I don't always follow the rules? I also got a soak in on my pine baits.

Music provided by Justin Somerville.

 ( Keep it in the Water )