Handmade fishing lures - Lure Swimming Bench

I thought it would be good to be able to see my hand made lures swimming on a bench in front of me so I made a wind tunnel. Actually its a water tunnel.

It looks like this.

It's a piece of 90mm storm drain PVC, capped at each end with a window cut into the top, and two hoses attached with wire.

The hoses are attached to an old swimming pool pump, so that the water recirculates forever. The pump is the slightly yellowish thing with a hose entering into the top of it that you cant see very well in this underexposed photo.

The greate advantage of this is it allows rapid prototyping. I can make a lure, with all its bits held together with chewing gum and test it without subjecting it to all the forces and stresses of casting etc. It allows me to adjust where the tow point is, test it, and adjust again all within seconds. It allows me to see what my lures are doing, and allows me to compare them with other lures that I know work well. It also allows me to see what my lure will do at different retrieve speeds and with different retrieval techniques.

This is a video of a store bought Halco™ lure that is one of my favorite lures. I used this to test the lure swimming bench because I know this lure performs well, although I wont be trying to make a lure like this 55mm example as I suspect it will be too difficult to secure the harness at this scale. My lures will probably measure closer to 90mm. (The hooks have been removed from this lure to keep it closer to the surface for the sake of the video. Interestingly it still swims perfectly without them.)