Well my mark one Rimu stick bait got smashed by a rat king on Saturday and ended up swiming away attached to the poor king. At least I know now that they will catch real fish, not just coutta.
I had a PM asking how I put it together so I thought I'd start a bit of an information sharing approach to these things and hopefully others will share some of their methods as well.
This is mark two stick bait all decorated and needing a coat of epoxy...
The paint jobs a bit rough in places but I'm pretty happy with it considering it was my first try and its just done with a bunch of spray cans I bought at Bunnings.
These two are mark three and mark four versions.
Mark Three...
Mark Four....
Mark Four is slightly hump backed compared to three. I didn't really plan it that way but since they are all hand carved they have each come out slightly different shapes. It will be interesting to see which works and which doesn't.
I've been starting off with just a basic outline sketched onto a piece of wood. Then I've cut the shape out using a jig saw, after that I map out where the holes need to be drilled and drill them. This has been quite a tricky stage getting the holes front and back to line up. I've decided to add wheight to the tails so I've used a much larger drill bit from the tail and this has helped with lining up with the smaller hole drilled through the nose.
I've then whittled away with a pocket knife until I get the basic shape, then wood rasp until I get good roundness and symetry of shape. The next stage is sanding until you get an all over smoothe finish. This is basically the stage that the two above baits are at.
The through wire construction is another tricky stage. I got some 1.6mm stainless wire from a local engineering shop. To bend it I've G clamped a allen key to my work bench and used vice grips to hold the wire and bend it around the key to get a basic circle. The wire is then wrapped around itself a couple of times to finish it off. I've also tried the bottom option of twisting the wire around itself but I'm not too sure if that will work so will probably pass on that method.
The wire passes through the nose and needs to catch the swivel that you will insert through the belly hole.
AT the tail end I then add small small ball sinkers over the protruding wire....
The mark two bait has five of these little sinkers shoved up its backside.
To finsih off the tail end I've then filled the end cavity with two part epoxy, (araldite), and capped it by using part of a pop rivet as shown here...
The wire is then finished off in pretty much the same way as you do the front end by making a circle and then wrapping the wire around itself to hold it in place, then just snip the wire off as close as you can get and file off any sharp edges.
This is how the tail end looks on mark two.
That's basically it!
These are all 190mm long, the finished mark two bait with the weights in its tail weighs in at 70g.
The only bad part about all of this is that I'm going to have to break the news to my wife that I'm going to need a Stella 20K and a popper rod for Xmas!!!
Thanks for looking
Murph