I think the swimming action of a popper is more likely related to its weight distribution and body shape, although too much cup might kill it. I'm not really sure but I've some limited experience getting needles and lazyfish to swim, and in those plugs it helps to think of the same principles that make a tin squid swim.

I used a large Silver & Deming drill parallel to the plug axis centered on the thru wire hole to make some acceptable popper faces. Tricks are not to go too deep, you only want the drill to just break the face of the plug at the bottom of the angle and use the right size drill to leave a ring around the face.

I know its a reach but when i am reading all this a lip-less Musso comes to mind, i know it has the top cut on the face but the bottom lip i believe has a slight indent?

Like this Gibbs popper?

Never seen that one before, thats like a reverse darter popper.

I will see if i can load a pic.of the lipless musso
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I made a Vega template for the W-Y and turned a couple to try some of the methods mentioned above to form a shallow face cup.

First thing I tried was the method Frech's friend used on his W-Ys: Heat a carriage bolt head and burn it into the face. I bought a 1/2" bolt, which had a 1 1/16" head -- perfect for this popper. Before I heated it, I turned it in my drill chuck to file off the raised lettering on the head. Afterwards I placed it in a vise and ran a propane torch on it until it was just about glowing, then pressed the birch face into it. It took a few repeats to burn it to the appropriate width/depth. What followed was a pretty messy sanding job to get the soot out of the cup.

End result was a shallow cup (again, it has the arc of about a 1.8" sphere.) As messy as it was, it was kind of fun, and I'm pretty sure I got a better-shaped cup than if used a hand-held rotary tool.

As you know, any popper face cut at a slant like the W-Y is shaped as an oval. The carriage bolt head is perfectly round so the face has the asymmetrical appearance that you see on a lot of wooden poppers.

To create a perfectly symmetrical shallow cup on a W-Y I’d need a rotary burr roughly the size of an ovalized softball…Can’t find that at MSC or Grainger. Instead, I thought I’d try to make a tool similar to what Numbskull mentions above.

To get the dimensions of the W-Y’s oval face, I placed it flat on a sheet of paper and traced the outline; ran it through a scanner and put it into Excel. I copied the oval and scaled it up to the size of the softball. If this really were a cutting burr, only a very small area on the outer edge of the oval would be used in the cutting, so I took that very outer arc and made a Vega template out of it. I used the template to create a hard maple turning.

Assumedly, this is the exact shape to cut a symmetrical cup into the face of the W-Y. The hard part is adding an abrasive surface to it; I tried hook & loop sandpaper that seems to word for foam-backed sanders but it “gave” too much during shaping and wasn’t durable enough to handle sanding birch.

I'll probably mess with this a little more but then park it for this winter. I can live with the shallow but asymmetrical cup from the carriage bolt on the few large poppers I need to finish this season. Running out of build time.

What size bit do you use?

I got this wrong. Recreating just an arc of a 4" oval works only in one plane on the popper face, but not the other.

Parking this for now.

Great work so.far eric love it.
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I got a whole set of cove bits cheap on sale I think 3/4 and 7/8 are the ones I use most.... you can go shallow or deep...I cut and face angle the thru hole sometime need to be alittle more than 1/8 I use a nail to make the hole bigger so the small tit the bearing sits on fits in the thru hole...then I put the drill press base up so when in holding the popper with a leather gloved hand the tail of the popper hits the base, so if the face is 65 degrees cut I hold it, if I'm right 65 degrees or what ever it is that makes the popper face 180 (flat)degrees to the cove bit I never push up to the bit, I use the drill press to lower the cove bit into the face of the popper

soft wood I just push the tit of the bit into the thru hole....the harder the wood I use a punch....if your making maple poppers you got to push harder to cup the mouth....I'm sure a vice for the drillpress is safer to hold the popper I don't use one and I don't wear gloves but a cove bit is a nasty thing to hit your hand... but that said it will cut the mouth of a popper clean you don't even have to sand the cup and do it in a sec or 2

Would something like this work
http://www.ebay.com/itm/2-PCS-CNC-ro...-/180922414998

I was thinkig a box can be made to.hold the plug then the bit lowered in with the drill press.



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heres 2 done with a cove bit.....mouth is not sanded...with the cove bit the more of a face cut the harder it is... but after a couple its not hard...

skippy I'm sure that would work with the right vice setup, one of the things about a cove bit that I like is the tit that holds the bearing when put into the thru hold centers the cove bit in the popper mouth...its like a no brainer to me...I don't have to center anything as long as the tits in the thru hole you can't be off too much

Makes sense
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Only for small poppers and ones where you don't need to plunge too deep since the tit of the bit is at the angle of the face, not parallel to the center hole.

If you plunge cut centered on the hole then cut a slant you get a thicker lip at the bottom of the plug. If you plan to do it this way you need to plunge off center about 1/8" towards the bottom of the plug.

Even then, if you plunge cut a popper face you end up with a deep cup which you often don't want.

This thread will help if you plan to do it that way. http://striped-bass.com/Stripertalk/...ht=blue+streak

Skip: This is the hardwood mold I created for the W-Y slugs.

Nice, i.like that what is the quality of the slugs?
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Typical, I suppose. They range from. 79 to .83 oz. They're about 3/4" tall. When through-drilled they weigh about .75 oz. They're 31/64" so they fit in the 1/2" voids, but I had to drill the voids almost 7/8" deep.
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Two more thoughts on creating a shallow popper cup:

1. Sanding: Cut a 4" ring through 1.5" thick hardwood with a hole saw, mount it in the lathe and use the Vega template to shape the curve on the outer face of the ring (this would be like taking the middle slice of a 4" x 5" oval). This still requires attachment of sandpaper, some kind of jig to hold the popper, etc. Winter.
2. Burning: For $20 (including shipping) I ordered a hollow stainless bearing, it's 3.5" in diameter. The hope here is I can place it in a vise, run a torch on it and press a popper face into it for an even shallower cup than the carriage bolt head. I might even risk squeezing it in the vise to deflect the shape into an oval. Probably my last popper cup experiment this spring.

For some reason I can't post pics.
My steps are:
Drill thru hole
Turn plug
Drill face with modified speedbore
Cut angled face

I still have and fish a few of the large atom bottle poppers and they definitely swim, at least with a siwash and feather on the back. I actually did well with the classic blue head, white body scheme on a full moon fishing an inlet one night. Like someone else stated, I was basically just letting it swing in the current....

Bottle popper for a buddy: 5.25", 1.3 oz, WRC, floater.

The herring paint job is ridiculous with 12 different subtle pearl colors, took me forever but what the heck -- it's a give away. Can't see it because my camera sucks but it really came out nice.

I used a 1" ball rasp on the face, so it's pretty deeply cupped and probably wouldn't swim well if retrieved too fast. He likes to fish from the sod banks deep in our local estuary during the herring run so it should meet his needs.

This is my first bottle popper. It floats level with the waterline at the middle of the back. To keep the tail from sinking I had to slide the in-line rear weights forward to about the middle of the belly and add 1.25" of 1/4" tubular closed-cell foam just forward of the tail grommet.

Burning a shallow popper cup into the face of a W-Y popper (1.125" diameter) with a 3.5" stainless, hollow ball bearing:

Thought you were done for this year lol, i.love it man, hard to tell how deep it goes.
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I like it; it's shallower than the 1/2" carriage bolt head.

You'll see it first-hand -- this one is yours.
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I've had pretty good results cutting the 5 or 6 popper faces that I've done using carving gouges. I have 3 or 4 of them (different sizes) and find that I can cut just about any diameter and depth that I want with them. I hold the plug in my hand and a cutting stroke is a combination of tool movement and hand rotation. When I get to where I want the mouth to be, I sort of force my thumb into a small square of sand paper, press in and rotate left to right to smooth out the tool marks and any end grain burrs. Not always 100% successful, but paint helps fill in any hollows. On average, each one takes about 10 minutes, no noise, no heat, no power tools, etc., but I do wear a mesh type carvers glove and I always try to keep the gouge edges sharp.