Handmade fishing lures - Two quick tips

I have two quick tips I worked out that might make your handmade fishing lures a bit easier to hand make.

Very quick tips.

One is to help work out where to put your tow point on the lure's bib, and the other is to help get your lure's bib straight.

When designing a lure, drill a series of holes down the length of your experimental bib. This allows you to explore what different tow point locations will do to your new design's action. You don't need to do this on every lure, but its worth doing on the first of a design, or at least doing once to learn a bit about tow point location and its value to your design. There can be a huge range of swimming action just from changing the tow point on your lure. Having a range of holes means you can tie to the different holes and gain a rapid understanding of how your lure works.*

The second tip is simply to put a large sheet of whatever your bib is made of into the freshly cut bib slot to check to see if the cut is straight. The larger sheet amplifies any errors, letting you know if any adjustment is required.

Pictured here is a CD cover in the bib slot of a lure. It was the only plastic I could lay my hands on at the time. CD covers make poor bibs because they are too brittle, but it does illustrate the idea.



*The overly observant may count the wire wrapped around the bib in the first photo as the third tip in this post titled "Two quick tips".

Handmade fishing lures - Single arc PVC and hot glue lure

I made another experimental lure yesterday. This time out of an arc cut from an 8 inch PVC pipe. I cut a section and ground it into the shape of a coffin lid. Then added some hot glue to the underside to give it a rudder. It was easily the quickest lure I'v made, taking only around 10 minutes from the time I thought of it to the time it was finished, and it shows. I added some red nail polish and some black marker lines to add some flash.

It looked like this.

From the side, you can see it still has that basic wing shape, but the bib is on the side rather than the front. There are a few lures on the market that employ this design, but I wanted to see how quickly I could make a cheap lure from scratch.













I added some split shot weights where the hooks would go and took it for a swim to see how it would perform. It did have a swimming action, but it was a lazy loping sort of thing that looked a little bored.

I think with a little design work and some testing time, it could end up being a good method of making quick and cheap lures. As with most things that can be made quickly, trial and error would soon arrive at a decent design.


But I'm not sure I care enough about this design to take it much further. I want to make something that looks great. I want people to gaze with wonder, and wonder "What master craftsman made such lures as those?" that will one day fill my tackle box. In short, I want someone to look at my lures and have lure envy, not a look of pity in their eyes.

I want someone to look at my lures and say "Wow!" not "Maybe!"

I'm going to have to make my lures look better, and while I'm at it I think they should swim better as well.

What I need is an idea.

Luckily, I have one.

Handmade fishing lures - Through wire construction

As part of my ongoing exploration of different methods of making handmade fishing lures I thought I'd give this a go.

Through wire construction simply means you have a wire connection from the tow point to the hook hang points. It's considered the strongest method for making handmade lures, and I have already tried it in my hot glue shrimp lure. This time I thought I'd try it in wood.

I found some wood that was roughly cimi-circular in cross section, so it looks like half a bracket if you look at the end "   (    " it also had a trench cut down the length of it. The trench should allow the wire to sit inside nicely.

From memory the wood cost around $6 Australian for 2 meters or something.

I pinned the 2 halves temporarily together by drilling holes and inserting a section shashlik sticks, or whatever you call "sticks to BBQ meat on" in your part of the world, as dowels. you could probably get away with a match stick or two.

I then shaped the wood making sure the length was correct so I could fit one of my wire harnesses into  it.

I then made a new harness a bit longer because I had failed to make the lure the correct size.

I struggle a bit to cut the slots for the bibs straight. What I probably need is some kind of tool. I think there is just such a tool, used to cut the angles on the corners of picture frames etc. that would suit.

As in both the harness and PVC experiments,  I only lightly glued the halves together so I could shape them accurately, but still separate them to fiddle about with wire afterwards.

Because I struggle with cutting the bib slots, I thought I would try a different idea for a change.

I ground the nose off on the bench grinder so that the bib would sit on the correct angle. I found this a bit easier.

I glued it all in place with superglue, making sure there was a long loop of wire sticking out the front so I could adjust the swimming action. A lure's action is largely enabled by the selection of tow point. Making the tow point long allows the fisher to change where that tow point sits on the lure by bending the wire. I hope.

Another thing that might need adjustment is buoyancy.

The finished lure in some odd way, simultaneously looks both normal and strange, and measures 90mm in total length..

Handmade fishing lures - Hydrodynamics

I don't have the required funding for the wind tunnel I really need for this post, so at great personal expense, I'll be using crayon.

In air, a wing generates lift by creating a low pressure system above it by forcing the air to stretch out as it passes over the curve of the wing. The curve over the top of the wing means the air has to travel over a longer distance than the air going over the straighter bottom section. Stretched air equals less air per lump of space, equals low pressure. When you have less pressure above something, compared to that which is below it, that something gets sucked up.

A sail sucks a boat along in the same way, using the low pressure created by a wing shape to suck the boat forward. If you look down on a sail from above as in this realistic diagram, it has a cross section like that of a wing (thats the wing bit sticking out to the left). With a sail, the force generated is roughly at right angles to the bulging side of the sail. The wing shape is made by the bulging bit on one side, and on the other side by the tendency for the air to take a short cut straight across from one side of the sail to the other.


In a wing shape moving along level with the horizon, the force is roughly upwards.

I'm pretty sure the forces acting underwater are similar, or at least behave similarly, to those that work in air.

The force acting on a lure is also roughly upwards.

those diagonal purple wind lines are from a different diagram

A lure is often designed as a wing shape, but strangely, this helps the lure dive deeper. As far as I can tell, it does this by lifting the tail, and forcing the nose to pitch down.

It also has a bib. A bib doesn't act as a wing, but rather, acts more like a rudder. The bib adds length to the lure without adding lift at the front of the lure. The bib also encourages the lure to follow the direction to which the bib points, because it makes it too hard for the lure to swim directly towards the fishing rod. Point the bib down, and the lure will go down. The bib is set so that it presents as a flat plate resisting being pulled along. Picture pushing a flat dinner plate through the water. If you turn it edge on, its much easier to push. If you drop the plate flat into water, it wont just sink straight down, it will try its hardest to get some sideways to add to it's downwards. In much the same way, the bib wants to move in any direction other than flat up or flat down. Because the lure is being pulled along from roughly the front, the bib is limited in just how stubborn it can be. It negotiates a compromise and moves generally forwards, a bit down, and has a go at moving a bit to each side. The attached line gives it a bias to forwards.

A dropped dinner plate might also go to one side, spill a bit of pressure, then rock back to the other side. This may repeat so the path of a dropped plate may well be a zig zag all the way to the bottom. I generally encourage experimentation, but if you must drop plates into the bath, I suggest waiting until you find yourself bathing at someone else's place, and use their plates. Interestingly, and not without an incredible amount of forward planing on my part, this dinner plate zig zag might also go some way to explaining how a bibbed lure gets it's swimming action.

A sail boat achieves a similar compromise. If the wind is coming from one side, it wants to blow sideways with the wind, but the shape of the boat, and the sail set so that it sucks the boat forward, make the boat track roughly forwards.

That means a sailboat can sail into the wind, but not directly. In fact there is around 45 degrees each side of dead into the wind where you can't point your sail boat (pictured here scribbled in red). Whilst that last point is perhaps the most interesting, it isn't really relevant.

So, to reuse a previous crayon graphic. A long bib set at an angle pointing just slightly lower than flat, can force the lure to pivot at the tow point, and point down. This will force it to rotate about the tow point.

Some kind of vague approximation of that effect is depicted here by green arrows pivoting around a drawing of a bow, tied in imaginary string.





A long flat bib encourages the lure to swim to the bottom, a short, sharply downwards angled bib makes for a shallow diving lure.

Exactly why a short, steeply angled bib makes for a shallow diving lure remains a mystery to me, so for the time being, will remain unexplored.

Handmade fishing lures - Bibs

As far as I can tell, bibs steer lures down to deeper water, and perhaps add to the action (wiggly fish-like swimming behavior). Because this is a handmade fishing lure, this needs to be a hand made bib.

I think I now have a fair understanding of the basics of what a bib should look like, and roughly how it does some of the stuff that it does. I'm sure I'll find out a lot more as I progress.

There are at least two problems I can see. One is that I don't have anything to make a bib out of, and the other is I don't know how to attach it.

 I have a new camera

My first attempt didn't do so well. I thought an old CD might make a good bib, perhaps by glueing two of them back to back. But it seems CD's are laminated, so when you try to saw them into shape, they break away into layers, leaving you with a very thin bit of frayed plastic that looks nothing like a bib. (Not that it really matters as this lure is never really going to catch fish. This particular lure is really just to discover exactly how much I don't know)

My second bib worked a bit better.

I started with a folded piece of paper and cut out half the shape, so that opening it would reveal the full shape in perfect symmetry.

I cut a bib sized section from a 200mm PVC pipe (the PVC from the media screen in the grow bed from my ongoing aquaponic fish growing caper*)


Then I glued it to the PVC with PVA wood glue (or whatever else you might have (It's only temporary)).

I then began to cut the shape out with a coping saw. My coping saw blade broke, and the glue hadn't dried so the paper came off. As I had no more saw blades, I turned on the bench grinder and just, kind of, ground it all into shape by eye.

Oddly enough that worked perfectly.

Most store bought bibs are made of clear plastic, but it seems people have a lot of handmade success with bibs made of all kinds of stuff including metal, so I'm not going to be too worried that I can't see through my bibs at this stage. What I really want to check is what this design will do in the water. Trying to prevent it flapping about on the surface is my goal at the moment.

I stuck the two pieces together with a drop of superglue to see what it looks like.

It looks like this.

Rather lure-like if you ask me.

*shameless self promotion to those who navigate here by way of fishing orientated searches