Wigglers again

[salmobytes 0]

Just finished tuning a new batch of wigglers. They're ragged and don't look like a consumer product you'd buy at the store. But they sure do work well. Every one of them. I'm starting to get the hang of this. Polishing their appearance would be the last and most important step from a marketing point of view. But not from a fishing point of view. Fish don't care about beautiful. The tails are stuck together on a few of these only because they're still wet. Fresh back from the testing tub.

 

They all sink at rest--somewhat like a Countdown Rapala--but they're a lot lighter. My local fly shops all sell big Conehead Woolly Buggers that are heavier than these. Some sink faster than others. I never really know exactly what I'm going to get until I'm finished tuning it. These are all tuned for moving water rather than still. For still water I would have left the bills a bit wider.

 

On a few of these I experimented with flattened solder for the weight. It took a little more effort to get those tuned. Beads are better because the weight effects the wiggle. So it's more flexible at the tuning stage to be able to

 

1) trim the bill with scissors or toe nail clippers (if the flure tracks to the right trim the left side of the bill)

 

2) change the position of the leader exit hole (lower down dives more but wiggles less and versa visa)

 

3) change the weight up front by changing bead size.

 

 

Trying to describe a step-by-step in words would be difficult. But I also spent the last few days setting up a mini-closeup video studio. I've got my fingers crossed--that I'll be able to figure the video puzzle out. The pie slice of fly fishermen who will want to make these is probably small. But if I scale the weight up with more foam and more weight proportionately these should be an interesting development for the hardware guys, because these lures are a lot faster and easier to make than hand carved wooden plugs. I'm not denigrating wooden plug making. Hand carved and hand painted wooden plugs are an art form. But these guys are fast by comparison.

 

Right now I'm at about 10 minutes start to finish for each one for the making. And another five minutes or so for the tuning. That's more time than a typical fly. But a heck of a lot less time than a traditional hand made crankbait.

 

With a little tubing built into the underside of a much bigger and heavier plug it wouldn't be hard to trail a treble hook off the rear end. That's not really my thing. But it might be for the wide wide world of hardware fishermen. This will be interesting.

 

For me they're still flies. Or perhaps flures. As I make them they're too light for any spinning rod and plenty castable with a typical streamer (fly) rod.

[Cannonx4 0]

I like them, what are you using for the bodies and bills? Sort of looks like craft foam for the body?

[salmobytes 0]

I have some hard-to-get foam I bought for boat seat cusions. EVA at 2-lbs per cubic foot. But the easier-to-find Evazote (at 4-lbs per cubic foot) is fine. Any closed cell foam. Bills are made from Costco tomato containers. Trim to shape too big (will trim later). Rough up with sand paper. Glue the two together. I wrap thread over top and add more glue. Then it never comes apart. Fished for 1 hour today. It was so bright the fishing was slow.

 

It's supposed to be cloudy on Wednesday. I'll again then.

[salmobytes 0]

Fly Rod Flure Summary

 

I don't know much about bass fishing. I did it as a kid in New Jersey and then moved West and never looked back. Most bass lures float at rest and dive only upon steady retrieve. Some, like Countdown Rapalas sink a little. But not much. You've got to count a long time before they go very far. West Coast Steelheaders pull plugs with large-billed "Hot Shots" that dive well. But they too float at rest. They require an oarsman in a big drift boat to pull back hard on the oars so the downstream current pulls a big lure down. Wiggling as it goes. In that sense, among plug pullers it's the oarsman who's doing most of the fishing.

 

When I make my flures I (still) never know exactly what I'm going to get. About half of my efforts work right off the vise. Half need considerable tuning in the bath tub. I mentioned a bullet list of tuning techniques above. When I'm done some of my efforts wiggle widely. Some wiggle with a more tight vibration. Some dive better than others. Some dive like daemons but don't wiggle much. Some don't wiggle at all but dive and dart left and right, veering off on long high speed tangents. All are valuable.

.

The one trait they all share is sink. They all sink quickly even at rest because I make them that way. That's what works best for fishing in rivers while wading, walking standing and casting. And for casting toward holding spots from a moving drift boat. Because my flures sink I can cast them upstream and let them drift, gaining depth as they go. Once they get even a bit downstream they begin to move and at that point they still hold their depth--rather than shooting right back up to the surface, as most downstream wet flies do as your line straightens out. And when I'm casting from the front of a moving drift boat, usually casting a bank side holding spots or mid-river seams, they don't shoot back up to the surface when I strip them in.

 

This is something you cannot buy. There is no sinks-even-at-rest diving wiggling or darting flure for sale anywhere in the world. They're powerful fish-catching machines and the only way to get them is to make them yourself. Floating fly rod divers are for sale. You can still buy small #1 and #2 Flat Fish. But those are floating divers that never gain much depth and they're not easy to cast. Castable diving fly rod wigglers, that sink even at rest you have to make. There is no other way.

 

The ability to put action on a small streamer-like fly WITHOUT immediately pulling it right back up to the surface is lighting in a bottle. These really are fish-catching little machines. I have access to a small private section of a famous Spring Creek. I won't say where for obvious reasons and I'm not the only one allowed to fish there. Traditional fly fishing is often fabulous there during peak mid-summer hatching events. And in the evenings too. There are some giant fish in that tiny little creek. But in the late afternoons when the bugs aren't hatching or in the Fall when the season's bug events are long gone traditional match-the-hatch fly fishing techniques will leave you empty handed and frustrated.

 

During those midday slow times, however, I can still wack'em. Big time. With small (very small) down and across streamers. Even better yet with tiny wigglers. Small spring creek wigglers are like a fly fisherman's Kentucky Moonshine on a Friday night.

 

Finally. In case there is any doubt I'm dead serious. This is not wobbledegook. I promise you :=))

[mikechell 0]

I won't argue with you about flies, I haven't seen all the flies available ... but you are incorrect about bass fishing lures.

There are suspending baits that are slightly less than neutral bouyancy, which will float up, slowly, at rest.

There are suspending baits that are slightly more than neutral bouyancy, which will sink, slowly, at rest.

The floaters, as you say, pop back to the surface when at rest, which is desirable in weedy situations. You can float the lure right out of a snag.

There are sinking baits that go down fast. Many of those, these days, have diving "heads" with soft plastic bodies. These will do exactly as you say yours do.

 

One thing that does hint at ... odd.

"When I make my flures I (still) never know exactly what I'm going to get. About half of my efforts work right off the vise. Half need considerable tuning in the bath tub. I mentioned a bullet list of tuning techniques above. When I'm done some of my efforts wiggle widely. Some wiggle with a more tight vibration. Some dive better than others. Some dive like daemons but don't wiggle much. Some don't wiggle at all but dive and dart left and right, veering off on long high speed tangents. All are valuable."

 

If you can't duplicate action, then the "system" is flawed. If your catching with one fly, and then lose it to a big fish. You cannot guarantee that the next one you tie on will catch fish. It might have been the action of the first one that was triggering strikes and you might not be duplicating that action.

 

Again, I am not arguing, just observing and opinionating. You like them, I understand.

[salmobytes 0]

RE> "you are wrong..........about no sinking bass lures"

I did say I didn't know much about bass fishing. The only sinking lures I see out here are Count Down Rapalas. They sink but not quickly. I can make wigglers that sink like a stone. And yet still wiggle.

 

RE> "you have a flawed system"

Absolutely. Making wigglers that work is a tricky business. But I am way ahead of everybody else. I started this project in the early 1980s. What I now know I could teach someone in an hour or two. But it's taken me 35 years to get there. Actually I can reproduce ones known to work. But I'm always trying new stuff. Fiddling with dimensions etc. And they are volatile. Slight variations in dimensions create different actions. That's good. That way you end up with variety.

 

Google searches turn up surprisingly few DIY lure making sites, compared to fly tying anyway. The ones you do find are all about time-consuming traditional carving and painting techniques. I think I am the only one who is making them quickly out of foam and tomato containers. Certainly the only one I've found I have looked around. Nobody out there is doing what I am.

 

The ability to put extra extra action on small to medium to large sized minnow-like flies is powerful stuff. Zillions of fly tiers have been experimenting with "articulated" streamer techniques for a long time now. That's good. Action helps. But I'm several steps higher up the action ladder than articulated streamers. Articulated wigglers? Now there's a good idea. I'll have to work on that one.

 

Being able to strip the flure in and to fish downstream without losing depth is powerful stuff. So called "fly rod" Flat Fish you can buy are hard to cast, never gain much depth and the damn things usually have treble hooks, which make releasing fish difficult. Single hook fast sinking wigglers that cast well with a fly rod don't exist. Except in my box. I'm passing on everything I know--so maybe that will change. :=))

[mikechell 0]

Yep, like I said in my original response ... it's definitely innovative.

[salmobytes 0]

I told myself this thread had come to a good conclusion and now it was time to move on. I'm ready to start tying Caddis flies now anyway. I'm pretty close to done with lures for the year.

 

But now I've fallen prey to temptation. The flures I posted earlier were too light to cast with a spin rod. Let alone bait cast rig. So what ever they are they aren't really lures. This one--pictured below--is a flat out lure. It's a large junk of foam built around a 3/8 ounce lead weight with polyethylene tubing running through both the foam and the lead worm weight buried inside. This cannot be cast with a flyrod.

 

Trouble is I'm not a lure fisherman. I have a few spin rods but never use them. But it is interesting. I spent some time web surfing today. There are lots of lure making websites and discussion forums out there. But lure making seems to mean 1) twisting up spinners 2) molding soft plastic and 3) spending hours and hours carving wood, embedding wire, carefully mounting a pre-formed diving bill and then applying primer and multiple coats of paint. Hand made wigglers made that way can take a week for each one. Poppers are often made around rigid styrofoam. But all the crankbait diving wigglers I could find (that were not plastic molded in computer controlled injection machines) were hand carved wood. I made the following in about ten or fifteen minutes. If I made a bunch more it would get quicker.

 

I'm not sure how many more of these I'll make because I don't use them anyway. Perhaps I'll make a few more and post them on a lure making site just to see what happens. Fifteen minutes is a heck of a lot better than several days of work. Crankbaits are expensive too. $6 bucks at the cheapest up to $15. Each. To apply different finishes you could start by roughing up the foam with sand paper. And then finish by dipping the body blank in hot liquid worm resin. Well that would be next to last. Sewing in and gluing in tail and fin fronds would be last. Pumpkin flake finishes might bump the making time up to a half an hour each. But that still beats the tar out of several days. I have so much fun making these I might have to become a lure fisherman after all.

 

This is, by the way, a fast sinking and very vigorous wiggler.

 

[TheCream 0]

Are you sure you're the only one doing this?

 

http://www.orvis.com/p/gulley-fish/17pc

[Fisherboy0301 0]

Are you sure you're the only one doing this?

 

http://www.orvis.com/p/gulley-fish/17pc

 

The wigglers salmo is using/making are much easier, faster, maybe not as durable, but just as fishable i made one last night, for the first time and it only took about 5 min to make and 10 min to tune in the tub. that fly as a pre made fly lip and a mylar tube body, coated in epoxy or uv resin, seems like a more difficult and complicated pattern.

[TheCream 0]

 

Are you sure you're the only one doing this?

 

http://www.orvis.com/p/gulley-fish/17pc

The wigglers salmo is using/making are much easier, faster, maybe not as durable, but just as fishable i made one last night, for the first time and it only took about 5 min to make and 10 min to tune in the tub. that fly as a pre made fly lip and a mylar tube body, coated in epoxy or uv resin, seems like a more difficult and complicated pattern.

 

 

Not sure about the body, but the lip being premade is 1) easier to use and 2) not needing to be fine tuned. And back to my point of posting that link...does the same thing. Sinks and wobbles.

[Kudu 0]

Salmobytes

Thanks for posting, I like them. They seem useful.

[salmobytes 0]

RE> " Not sure about the body, but the lip being premade is 1) easier to use and 2) not needing to be fine tuned. And back to my point of posting that link...does the same thing. Sinks and wobbles."

 

That's a reasonable conclusion for someone on the outside looking in, who hasn't tried both methods. But "Not needing to be tuned" is speculation on your part :=)) However. As it turns out. You wrong.

 

Pre-made lips are a giant pain at the hobby level because they do need tuning--and a lot of it--and that tuning is far harder. Wigglers are extremely volatile. Imperceptible variations in position and weight distribution make a flure or lure that doesn't track or wiggle properly. The beauty of what I'm doing is that it is lightning fast by comparison. And because I glue the bills on a tad too big and because they're thin enough to cut with scissors I can tune them quickly too. And always get something that works.

 

Rapala has neat promotional video illustrating how they make wood bodied lures. It's out there on the web somewhere. Their many years of experience and precision machining practices produce peas-in-a-pod lipped blanks with absolutely minimal tuning required. But they still need to be tuned. They have employees who put finished lures on a stick and test wiggle them in small narrow tanks. Their precision techniques mean tuning is minimal and manageable. But still necessary.

 

The corollary is what happens when you build lures by hand without 100 years of product development precision. Then you need a lot of lure tuning and that quickly crosses the line from easy to exasperatingly difficult.

 

Homemade hard bodied wigglers with thick factory made bills glued in place by hand are bad for your teeth and they cause your wife to tell you to stop cussing. You end up drilling holes in the body of lure in order to glue in off-center micro split shots to get the lure balanced, like lead weights clamped on at tire alignment time. My method is far quicker and easier. Snip snip snip. You're done. Floating lures that wobble a bit are not so hard. But finely tuned divers that sink even at rest are far more difficult. Particularly so if you try to use fat plastic pre-formed, factory-made diving bills.

 

I don't have any photos yet. But there are some promising coloring techniques too. You can mark up white closed cell foam with "permanent" color markers from the drafting supplies store. And then brush on a thin coat of water based fabric cement, which cures to a machine washable yet still flexible finish (machine washable in the clothing context). Water based fabric cement is in the same chemical family as "Swedish" water based hardwood floor finishes. The only real difference is hardness. They tune hardwood floor finishes to cure to rock hard. Fabric cement reaches a water proof state after about 24 hours of drying. But it remains surprisingly soft and flexible.

 

Poking a magic marker and painting over top with clear water based fabric cement is a lot quicker and easier than air-brushing and stenciling with solvent based lure paints.

[TheCream 0]

In my experience, I have never had to tune a pre-made diving bill. And contrary to your opinion, I have had experience with them. These floaters were my first efforts, they required zero tuning.

 

 

 

Here's a snippet of underwater footage I shot last year of the deer hair version in action:

 

 

I didn't fish them much because they are a pain to cast due to the diving nature. It's not that easy to just pick them up and make another cast without stripping in all of the line you have out. Out of curiosity yesterday I decided to see if I could come up with a slow sinking version. Tub testing suggests these will also need no additional tuning. They sink slowly and orient correctly due to the channel lead I used on the belly of the tube. The construction, with zero exposed thread, should be essentially bullet proof. Also, the tube style allows for the hook to stay in a consistent position and be made weedless, if so desired.

 

[salmobytes 0]

Nice looking lures. You're obviously better at this than me. Although I must say those deer hair lures will float at rest and probably never gain more than 12" inches depth. If that much. Very cool bass lures perhaps, but not so good for fishing with a fly rod into deep moving water. In fast moving rocky mountain trout rivers.

 

I thought I mentioned it several times. I was talking about deep diving sink-even-at-rest flures still light enough to cast with a flyrod. That's a far more difficult goal than a floats at rest gurgler that never gains more than a foot of depth.

 

You can make a sinks-even-at-rest lure with a ton of weight but then they're too heavy for the fly rod and then they seldom wiggle well. If you reduce the weight they're devilishly tricky to tune properly, so they still sink (even at rest) and still wiggle and still dive and DO NOT flip over and plane back up to the surface. If you try to do that with pre-made bills your hair turns gray. I'm talking about light weight deep divers and not big surface floating gurglers hat never reach much depth.

 

Your very fine creations aren't that. They do look very cool. I like the way you attached those factory bills to a tube. When I did fight with factory bills (unsuccessfully) I did not use that technique. I tried attaching the bills directly to a hook and that never worked out.

 

Also. Finally. I apologize for being an asshole about it earlier. I get a little on edge when ever I post anything about wigglers because I so often get flack from fundamentalist fly fishermen "Don't come to my fly fishing only water or I'll have you arrested," etc. Your lures are great.