October 15, 2016

Croatian Egg Lure

STL files for these design is available at Printables and can be found HERE.

This was suppose to be a Croatian egg lure that I was trying to design on request. From what I understand a Croatain Egg is suppose to float with the hook out of the water and be great for weedy or lily pads areas. With the inverted hook floating out of the water it should skip right over most vegetation without getting snagged.  Unfortunately the design is suited more for a buoyant type balsa wood rather than 3D printing. Even printed at only 10% infill and heavily weighted up front I could not get the hook to float out of the water and if I added more weight it would just sink.

The first prototype had room for only 3 BB’s up front.

Using the pattern I was giving I used a 4/0 hook and extended the shank with stainless steel wire.

I painted the first one in a frog pattern.

Unfortunatly with only 3 BB’s it did not sit correctly in the water at all.

The second attempt.

On this one a used 12 BB’s and it worked pretty well and produces some good pop action on the twitch but at this stage it’s just a normal popper lure and really not a Croatian egg.

With 9 BB’s and a conventional downward hook setup produced a good angle and added a little rattle to the lure but is still just a popper.

I’m still working on this and I just need to shorten the length of hook sticking out the back to change the center of gravity. I think once I do this I can get the Croatian egg action I am looking for.

5-20-18 Updated Design

To fix the design I moved the hook forward and also used a shorted and lighter hook. These are the hooks I used for the new design. They were the only straight shank hooks I could find and they have a wire guard so I incorporated this into the new design.

The hook still requires a bit of an added extension.

Each half holds 3 BB’s and they are glued in before the halves are glued together.

After gluing the halves together and giving it a quick sanding the lure is ready to test.

The new design now floats with the hook out of the water but still needs to be tested under real fishing conditions.

I painted up the new designs… This one is your basic frog pattern.

I have a lot of success with blue topwater lures so I had to do one up in blue.

I always caught a lot of pickerel on yellow lures so I gave that a shot too.

A little real world testing… it floats great and has a good popper action to it.

This is a rounded Nose “Walk the dog” version I should be able to get a zig-zag on the retrieve with this one.

Finally got around to giving these a proper test today the popper version produced a good “POP”…

… and the egg had a good walk the dog action. Both were incredibility weedless too, I had no problems throwing them in the middle of the pads.  I had a few hits but unfortunately no hook ups.

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