Handmade fishing lures - Wire

Wire is one of the greats. It's power lies in its ability to be made shorter and apply great tension, with the application of many small amounts of effort on the human's part.

Wire comes in many varieties. Some of which will stay in whatever shape you ask it to. Others will spring back into the shape they were in before.

Levers, gears, pulleys, hydraulics, and wire all act in ways that allow a lot of small force to exert a bit of large force. Its sometimes called mechanical advantage.

If you want to make something be under a stack of tension, make it out of wire and twist it. Twisting wire makes it shorter. A stack of twists makes it only a bit shorter. Many small amounts of energy that are required to twist some wire, get converted into a whole lot of tension, because all that moving of your arms is converted into only 1/2 an inch of shortening. If you had enough strands of wire connecting your house with your neighbor's, and twisted each strand until it was tight, then repeated for a few months, you could drag your houses together. So don't do that. Their house is close enough already.

I love wire. A predisposition to wire love is in my genes.

I made my experimental, hot glue shrimp lure by building up glue around a wire harness, but forgot to show how I made it.

I started with a drawing of the shape I wanted on piece of wood. Then hammered some nails in upside down so I'd have the sharp ends sticking up.

Place the nails so if you bend your wire around them, you'll get your shape.

The first one I made had the nails up the normal way but it wouldn't release the finished wire harness because the wire got stuck on the nail heads. The plan is to use the nails as a pattern or jig to bend the wire around.

Bend the wire zig zag through the jig, making sure you go around the nails on the correct side so that the nail forces the bend the way you want it.

Grip the loops in a vice and twist the end around itself.

Trim the ends with the cutters you borrowed from your mum a few years ago, and never got around to returning.

After you release it from the vice, you will just need to straighten it up a bit. 

And its done.

The alternative to this continuous single wire construction, or through lure construction, is to use screw in eyelets at each of the three points. The advantage of having all your wire loops connected to each other is that if you catch a fish big enough or with teeth sharp enough to break your lure, there will still be a good connection between the fish and your rod. 

Added to this is the bragging rights you get by making a lure that still caught the fish even though the lure was bitten in half, and the fact that you don't go hungry.