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| Message Subject: Basement Builders | |||
dzklrz |
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Posts: 110 Location: WI | Just a few questions about you guys. How old are ya? How did you get into making lures and how long have you been doing it? What is your main job? I am 26, I got into the whole musky deal by accident (5 yrs ago) by catching one while bass fishing. I swore I would never fish for musky, big ass rods and reels $$, big $$ baits, and you are lucking to have a follow in a day!! Anyway, all of that went out the window after I caught my first! Not longer after buying a rod and reel and a few lures I started to think, I work with wood all day (I am a carpenter) why not try to make some for myself! So the journey began, I look at the first lures I've made and look at what I make now and what a difference!! I thought that when I started I could not make a better lure, they look like sh!t to what I make now, so in my short lure making hobby of 4yrs. I soon found out that you never stop learning! That is why websites like this are so valuable. When I started making lures I could'nt find any websites like this, it was all trial and error, I guess that is half the fun. Everybody has to start somewhere! The biggest thrill for me is the finished product catching fish. There is no bigger reward than catching fish on something that your hands made, or hearing that one of your customers catching a fish of a lifetime!! Chad | ||
| esoxlazer |
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Posts: 336 Location: Lino Lakes, MN | Chad, Im 25 myself and stumbled into the musky game pretty much the same as you. Lucked into one while bass fishing in Canada in 2002. Got back home and started asking around and ran into my cousins best friend who owned a tackle company and did some guiding. He kinda took me under his wing and took me out on my first day of real musky fishing. I would call and bug the heck out of him with questions galore, but he was always willing to answer anything I could throw at him. Turns out that last year he was looking to sell his tackle co. and asked if I would be interested. Ive always loved building stuff, so I went for it. Been doing it for a year now. Had a bunch of medical issues this past year that kept me from doing it as much as I would like, but Ill be getting back at it next week sometime. I have gotten lots of advice from the guys around here that has definitely shortened the learning curve. Looking forward to sharing and learning a lot more as I get back into it all. Im in school still, so I have plenty of time on my hands for building. When school is all done, Ill be teaching, so that gives me a good chunk of my summers to chase fish and build baits. I have definitely gained a new appreciation for the amount of time and care that goes into making a completely handcrafted bait. Good post to see where everyone is coming from. Eric | ||
| Muskie Pat |
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Posts: 284 Location: Fishing the weeds | I'm 44 and have been Muskie fishing for about 10 years. Only the last 5 or so seriously. I'm an Arborist (Tree Surgeon) in my other life. Have been a tinkerer my whole life. Started building Bucktails 3 years ago. And had good success with them. Now I'm trying my hand at wooden baits. My Dad in Minnesota is a life long woodworker and has been a tremendous help with the general knowledge of the craft. However this thread has really open my eyes to the possibilities and the pitfalls to look for. So many talented people and different ideas getting together and chatting is really awesome. This really shortens the learning curve. I have 3 friends who own sawmills so, getting material is certainly not an issue as I trade them whole logs for sawn lumber. Otherwise I'm sure my wife would have an issue with the price of finished lumber as it is. Pat | ||
| GMan |
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Posts: 479 Location: Eden Prairie & Pine Island | Started making Muskie lures as a lark several years ago...we were having the usual discusion about how Muskies and big Pike will devour little ducklings, etc., so I decided to carve a duck lure and after doing so decided to make some more serious Muskie lures. I showed up at a Swap one year with a few ducks and a few serious lures, guys would come look at the ducks because then they were the only duck lures available and also ended up buying some of my serious stuff. Next year at the swap the serious stuff sold like crazy! Since then I've made several different types of lures...the large cranks seem to have been the most successful, but each year I try to come out with something different. Now, I don't really sell the ducks anymore (too much hand carving, so I keeping the ones I have), but I make about 100 lures in the off season for friends or for sale. I associated with Cast-n-Blast for the painting last year, and now he's doing pretty much all of that for me. His painting is outstanding! I can focus more on making lures and allows us more of a custom line of baits. Its a hobby that keeps my head in the sport during the off season. | ||
| muskymeyer |
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Posts: 691 Location: nationwide | I am 40 and the first lures I made were when I was in high school. Very crude hand carved bass oreno style lures. Living on Lake Thompson in Rhinelander helped fuel the fire for lure making and musky fishing and I pretty much spent the summers on the lake. After high school I was fortunate enough to know Mike Bauer through a mutual friend and I started playing around making lures again. At this time I was learning the Chippewa Flowage which opened up a whole new world as far as topwater lures went. I went into about a 10 year hiatus in lure making that ended last winter at the request of a couple good friends. While I do not ever see me making large quantities of lures I do get enjoyment out of building and designing new lures. I like to say musky fishing is my full time job and working for a window and patio door company in the product development and operations areas is just a hobby. I have learned tremendous amounts from lure makers like Bauer, Oxley, Wick, Sennett, Lemay and many many others and my lures are a direct product of their techniques along with a few ideas of my own. And I owe a heartfelt thank you to the two friends who re-kindled my desire to make lures, Steve Bloss and Gale Oxley. Corey Meyer | ||
| ckarren |
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Location: Duluth, MN - Superior, WI | Chad, I’m 30 and I made my first wood lure just out of high school. Nevertheless I have my first lures that I carved. Why, they look like $h*t!!!! I just keep them for a smile or two. The TY-JACK lures I make now I started over 5 years ago. I started making baits for myself for 3 reasons. 1. I was mad at paying $20-$30 per bait and having to buy 3 or 4 to get one good one. 2. I wanted a glide lure that I could work with out killing myself. 3. I wanted a glide lure that I could change the speed from fast to slow or work it how I want to, not just one speed or it doesn’t work. After about three years of nonstop playing with and perfecting my bait. All my friends and family members convinced me to sell them. The whole process has not changed from making them for me to you. I put in the same love and labor in each bait, just as much if I was making the bait for myself. I love the prototype and testing of new lures. I have a soft plastic, a wood/soft plastic, (3) crank baits and (4) topwater lures I’m working on at this time. During the day I daydreaming about making lures, despite the fact that I work on computers (Every now and then). Great Subject! -Corey Karren | ||
| out2llunge |
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Posts: 393 Location: Kawarthas, Ontario | I'm 43 and have ben building baits on and off since I was a kid. Muskie baits didn't start until the mid 90s when I really decided tha I wanted to chase skies. Here in Canada, muskie lures were hard to come by and we still don't have the selection thatthe U.S. stores do. I started making everything from crankbaits to jerkbaits to gliders and most recently some topwater stuff. Still never developed the ability to paint like most of you guys - maybe one day. When I started there was little information out there on "how to" build baits. I remember chatting with a number of today's popular builders about the whole process. Manthe wealth of info that is out there now is fantastic. Folks seem much more willing to share over the last few years as well. I honestly think there has been an explosion of baits built by basement builders over the last couple of years. Lets keep sharing - it makes it better for all of us. | ||
| RiverMan |
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Posts: 1504 Location: Oregon | I am 43, live in Oregon, and have made some type of fishing lure for about as long as I can remember. I started out as a kid tying flies to be used on area trout streams and with time moved on to spinners and various soft plastics. In college I invested an enormous amount of free time working on various concepts that required injection molds. Ultimately I ended up building literally several hundred plaster molds with very little success. As time went on and the internet became available I was finally successful in building many of the plastics I had worked on for so long. After college I became interested in building big baits and worked on a variety of swimbait type lures. I had literally no wood-working skills whatsoever so read everything I could at the library and online. With time I learned what a bandsaw was! I would have killed to get the video Lunge put together on lure-making....that would have saved me years of work, where were you in 1998 JP? The thing I did have tho was a strong understanding of fish behavior. I make my living as a fisheries biologist and perhaps more importantly as it relates to lure building have spent most of my life trying to catch fish of all species. When one of my lures was in the water I could very quickly tell if it was something "fish would like". About 5 years ago I read online about "gliders". I had never seen a real glider in my life but they sounded interesting. So I wrote dozens of glide-bait builders and most (nearly all) would tell me absolutely nothing about wood types, weighting, paint, etc. Finally I stumbled on a guy in Europe that was willing to tell me exactly how to weight gliders....I was thrilled! He even went so far as to send me a picture of a glider showing exactly where the weight should go, what a guy! My very first glider was a 7" Divani-like shape that I made from western red cedar. I finished the lure and took it along with me on an outing to a local lake for a day of trout fishing with my son. I threw the bait out in the water having no idea how to fish it or what type of action could be expected. I will never forget seeing that glider magically go one way and then the other, my son and I were both amazed at the action, I was hooked! From this point forward I built hundreds of gliders of all sizes and shapes, wood types, and weighting scenarios. I think the experimentation has really helped me build better lures...experimentation and research is the most fun part of building fishing lures. For those just starting to build glide baits I would very much recommend building dozens and dozens of lures. Keep careful notes about what the lure does with hard woods, soft woods, weight forward, back, etc. It will help you build better lures and besides that it's fun. Today I continue to learn and like others have dozens of new ideas running through my mind. I am very much inspired by the works of those who have been doing this much longer than myself like Jack Cobb, Hughes River, and Gene R. of Wyde Glyde fame. And like JP, I think there is an explosion of basement builders in recent years and this is largely a result of the internet. A new builder today researching the internet could probably have a working glider in a matter of days. Over time though I think many of the builders will come and go once they experience how much work goes into each lure...its most certainly a "labor of love". Jed V. Bikini Bait Co. Edited by RiverMan 2/4/2006 12:25 AM | ||
| esoxlazer |
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Posts: 336 Location: Lino Lakes, MN | The funny thing is that every thread begins like an AA meeting.  This bait building really is turning into a sickness....I keep dreaming up different ideas for baits all the time. Its really cool to hear where you guys are all coming from. I really hope to put out some of the craftsmanship that you guys display in your work. | ||
| Hoosierbaits |
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| This is a deffinately a sickness. I have been making baits since I was in highschool. Paid my entry to many bass tournaments with jigs and buzzbaits in the early years. I am now 47 and build musky baits exclusively. Topwaters and sinking gliders and crankbaits. Learned much of this on my own without the help of forums like this, so I really appreciate all the info available today. Caught my first musky and my largest to date the first 10 minutes of my first trip. 46 incher on a bucktail I made myself. The rest is history. Started making baits for my self mainly due to cost. Joined the Webster Lake Musky Club and started fishing with other guys and they asked me to make them baits. Then it spread to a friend of a friend and ebay. Now I only sell on my website and don't have enough time to spend with it. I work 50+ hours/week at my real job, 2 boys in highschool and baitmaking fill up my time. Don Slagle www.hoosierhandmademuskybaits.com | |||
| divani |
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 Posts: 2059 Location: Belgium | started six years ago to try and make smaller versions and small jerkbaits that I designed myself to fit my tackle. At the time a 7" jerkbait was standard but my tackle wasn't up to it and the waters that I fished didn't hold that many large pike. Continued doing it until last year due to certain circumstances. | ||
| Allstate48 |
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Posts: 389 Location: Corning, Iowa | Sorry guys, I'm 50+ years. Started 3 years ago Two thing you need to do this, Good eyes, and a lot of patience. I have neither, so I just make lures for myself. ALL you people, I applaud you for the work you do. Anyone that whines about the prices of these baits should try making some, and keep track of all their time put in to it. Good luck to all Doug | ||
| Beaver |
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Posts: 4266 | I just turned 50. Started tying my own walleye jigs about 30 years ago. Then after catching a few muskies, I started tying bucktails, and finally was happy with what I was making after a few years of trying. I made bucktails for years, and still do from time to time. My wife gave me an air brush about 10 years ago, but I primarily painted custom minnow lures for fishing walleyes on The Mississippi River. Then the brush sat idle for a few years until I got my hands on some topwater blanks about 5 years ago. Then I graduated to making 50 gliders in one year, and I think that I kept half of them and gave some away and sold a few. The next year it started at 50, then 50 more, then 50 more. Right now there are over 300 blanks in my basement. Over 200 ready for paint, the others will get produced when I get the first batches done and sold......IF I can do it before my daughter is out of school. Last year I did too much painting and not enough fishing, but this year she gets priority. Now that I'm actually building a "studio" in my garage, I should be able to make the lures during the winter months and actually might be able to have some ready for one of the shows next year....if I'm ambitious. Otherwise it will be business as usual with producing small batches at a time and selling them here or on tacklefirst. The whole painting thing was a trial and error thing for me, but when I switched to the paint that I use now, I noticed a real change in the quality of my work. I learn more every year, and still head out to the garage where I have about 75 sketches of patterns that I'd like to try, with no deinite plan. I like to experiment with blending and accenting colors. Some I make one of and put it right in my box, while others get the go ahead after I see them for the first time. Some patterns like "Pepto Puke" happen by accident. You never know what is going to happen out in the laboratory. I'm retired on a disability now, so on days when my back feels good enough, I might paint 20 lures. Many days I make none. It's not something that I intend to make a living at, because it's very time consuming and tedious at times. Like most other guys, it started as a hobby, and now it's just a bigger hobby. But it's a hobby that I enjoy. Especially when you get a picture from someone who just caught their personal best on one of your lures. I do things differently every year, and this year I'll be doing some new things. 3 different gliders, and a short run of a "Big Turd" topwater. Some new painting schemes and styles.........can't wait to get at it. Beav | ||
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