Playing with blade baits

I saw an interesting idea in another forum where a guy stuffed blades into stand-up jig mold regardless the flash  and made what he called a goby blade. Since my new magic minnow mold and blades had arrived and I bore easyly over christmas, I went to the workshop for a little blade session. I find the largest MM-Cavity a bit nose heavy and am looking for a vibrating lure around 2 oz that starts easier than the shad lure so I started with the shad spoon mold. Thogether with the x-large MM blade and the excess lead, the 1,5oz cavity actually weighs exactly that (top). Made only a few casts with them under dark and windy conditions - they seem to work and can be fished.  



The "goby" blades move nicely but tank testing indicates that 2 out of 3 times they don`t stand up so there is no practical use for them.  


this pictrue shows the drastic difference between trying to breack free the eyes before curing - massive chipping (left) - and drilling them afterwards with a fine drill. Much better results and not even too much time. The small blades will always clogue on me.  





x-large MM blades, largest cavity stand up head:




Regular MM-blades



medium blades put into the MM-Mold. No idea how these will work but I thought I made a trial on the heavy side. 

Cool looking baits and quite the ingenuity to make em!! Sure looks like they'll get bite.

Interesting variations of the Heddon Sonar or Silver Buddy. Pretty paint.

Today I had better conditions for testing. Here are my findings:

- the small blades did not work at all. Forget about them!




The angle of the blade matters. The upper one is fine, the lower one unsatisfying.



As to be expected, the ratio of weight/blade matters. The upper left one is too heavy. The lower left one is too flat (s.a.) The right one works just fine.  




For those of you who have the mold and got interested, this would be my recommendation as starting point.  




I also made some regular vibrating lure tin castings as a reference. In compare, all goby variants needed longer, not so sharp jerks. However, all sources recommend a short twitch rather than a long jerk in order to keep the lure in the strike zone. While practically all combinations vibrated at some point, I found only the half ounce / medium blade combo acceptable in this regard. A tin version worked equally well. Casting is very good btw, the goby tends to fly more straigt without helicoptering.
I worked only clean ground today but the originator mark wisniewski states that he experiences far less snags with it so other than my tank testing suggested it seems to work well under long-line-real life conditions. I also tried a tip-up but was not satisfied. Might be the balance, I`ll give it another shot.

I remember a board member putting a lot of effort into polishing brass blades so I asked WTP for a sample of die cuts. They fit nicely and are as close to polished brass as one could think off.  

Very nice paint...

The angle of the blade matters. The upper one is fine, the lower one unsatisfying.

Click to expand...

Ever think that the holes in the upper one might be why it's fishing better?

Old in-line mod-trick

The Goby's look neat, but there isn't a Goby in the state here. I played with painting some recycled used blades a few years back, and came on a winner color combo. Smaller blade, used vertical jigging, painted pearl white, then lightly shot a chartreuse back and a tiny spot of hot pink where the bottom of the gills would be. Outfished all others 3 to one til a tree wouldn't give it back after a lot of trying. If you get bored, give it a shot while I look for the pic of this that I have.

OK, so I had it backwards but here's the pic. The wife bought me an airbrush for Christmas that year and I painted everything in sight. Hope it works as well for you as it did me. Everything in the pic turned out to work very well.

The Idea fell into a time when there was no cod around to test the lure. Meanwhile, this has changed, and I gave it a serious shot. It has worked real fine in the harbour and produced equally well as my favorite tip-up bucktail jig. A friend said it has saved the day for him at an occasion when they didn`t take anythiing else in rather turbulent and stained water. It is very user friendly and effective even on not-so-clean bottom where normal blades are difficult to fish. 

The Idea fell into a time when there was no cod around to test the lure. Meanwhile, this has changed, and I gave it a serious shot. It has worked real fine in the harbour and produced equally well as my favorite tip-up bucktail jig. A friend said it has saved the day for him at an occasion when they didn`t take anythiing else in rather turbulent and stained water. It is very user friendly and effective even on not-so-clean bottom where normal blades are difficult to fish.