October 29, 2021

Flukes

These are some jerk bait fluke type lures that I am working on.  I made these in 2″, 3″, 4″, and 5″ sizes. I’ve been wanting to do a fluke bait for a while because I’ve never fished with one but never got around to it on the growing list of things to make. Well when I asked my recipient of this months “Super Secret Bait Makers Guild Bait Swap” what kind of custom bait he would like… he said he would love to have a 3 or 4 inch fluke for fall Crappie fishing so I had to move the Fluke to the top of my list.

I did up a quick design in Fusion 360 but the 4″ version I started with looked a little big for Crappie so I also scaled it down to 2″ and also 3″ sizes.

I decided to try and do a combo mold to handle both sizes at once.

This is what the design of the first mold looked like.

Here is the first printed mold ready to inject.

The first injection looked good…. at first.

But looking at the bottom side there was some bubbles on some of the baits. I normally like to position the baits vertical so the any air will rise up into the runner but the gates on these are very tiny being such a small bait.

Here you can see the bubbles in the nose of the bait better.

A lot of the test baits I shot were salvageable by just removing the head… I will fish these on a jig head.

To try and fix the problem I rotated the baits in the mold to see if this would fix the problem.

That helped a little as the bubbles were smaller but now they were in the high spots in the gill area.

Adding a few vents to that area did the trick and the baits seemed to inject really well after that.

Here are the tiny 2″ and 3″ version compared to my hand.  These should be perfect for the Chappies.

To test the little 2″ version I used a 1/64 oz Nail Head Jig.  It did kind of make the nose of the bait bulbous but I did catch a few perch while testing so it works.

I also tested the 3″ version on a jig head but I’m thinking it should work as a jerk bait if rigged as shown on the bottom bait. (need to find a EWG style hook still.)

I decided to go ahead with the 4″ version too because it should work for myself for bass fishing. I went though several redesigns of this mold too… including the 4 separate cavity laminate version shown above.

In the end I went with the same vented horizontal design that worked good for the other smaller sizes.

Here are some of the first test injections of the 4′ version.

Here is the comparison of the 3 and 4 inch versions.

With the hook slot in the bottom this worked great with a 3/0 EWG (extra wide gap) hook and had some great jerk bait action in the water during testing.

I sent out all the cool dual color laminates I did for the bait swap before taking pictures so I did some glow versions for myself just for fun.

Last but not least the 5″ version.  Also stuck with the horizontal design and also vented the eye on this one because it’s larger.

The printed mold.

Here is the first injection… did get a little denting on one but these are just for me… I don’t care and neither do the fish.

The finished Fivers ready to fish… (still need to get hooks though) and unfortunate they probably will  have to wait until next season.

The finished line up. Overall these all came out great and I’m happy I finally got around to making some flukes. Hopefully my fellow bait maker can get some Crappie and/or bass on the 2,3 and 4″ ones I sent him. (Update – He caught some bass on them.)

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