Bottle Popper vs Cigar Popper
 

Just wanted to get some thoughts around the effectiveness of the Bottle popper vs the cigar style popper.

From what i have seen the Bottle popper like Super Strikes seems to be the more popular style, but i have had success with the cigar style as well.

I am interested to hear the thoughts around which is more effective and why.

Bottle poppers are ugly.

-spence

The bottle shape casts better.
I suspect the straight shape fishes a bit better, but that's not said with any confidence.

I will say that poppers are deceptively difficult plugs to "get right".

The face angle, cup depth, and even line tie position have significant effects. The weighting scheme also seems more subtle than I anticipated. Tail heavy casts best, but belly weighted work better.

It is easy to make a plug that pops, but getting one that does so at the right speed and without tumbling is not so easy, and getting one that swims as well as pops is downright difficult.

Finally, cutting a wide shallow face on the larger ones causes me all kinds of issues. Deep faces are easy, but often create too much resistance.

Weight a bottle so it slightly tail down at rest. This requires some tail weight and some belly weight. Then cut your face angle so it is at right angles to the surface of the water.
This method allows you to chug the plug, pop it vigorously or try to give is a slow "swim" A very effective bottle!

Chug the plug!

poppers
 

coming from ri and near the atom's factory...I never understood why people spent the extra money on gibbs Polaris poppers...years later I found the gibbs bottle poppers were easyer for conv tackle they floated.....I don't think the fish care....but I seem to do better with atom( cigar) type popper each year

I want my poppers to swim.
Super strike 2-3/8 oz is close to perfect.
I am told that the Atoms and Frech straight ones swim also.
Just don't use them at night!
Or on Pike

I agree. The Frechs I made did not but I suspect I cupped the face too much. Also, the super strike was likely an accident. The larger and smaller styles don't swim as well. The large atom and big rebel poppers supposedly swam. I'll bet the large original three hook Gibbs popper did as well but I've never tried getting one wet.

when i started fishing all i had was a striper swiper on a solid fiberglass rod and a blue
cut my line... and that equalled no more fishing except for chunkin.
(no cash for plugs then )

but,
i was addicted to the top water hit.... and seeing the big ol trash can

So, i collected ash tool handles from the trash and took them to the school wood shop lathe
and cut a bunch in a row end to end on each ash handle... later i sawed them into plug sections.

to cut my cup face:
i'd wrap the plug in a rag and clamp it in the bench vice and then using a
large 3/4 inch rasp bit in a hand held heavy drill i'd burn it in until it was Black (smoking) and it made the wood even harder
-never sealed them or weighted them
and the bass chewed -em up in the 70's -those were the days :)

I wasn't familiar with the Frech WY popper so I Googled it and came across a scanned reprint of an article from Frech in The Fisherman magazine. The plans for the popper are in it. In the article he mentions it swims.

I think I'll make up a couple. Looks like fun. (Not sure how much fun cupping birch will be but I'll give it a shot.)

Birch is very agreeable

Eric, i saw your post with that , but i wasnt sure if i was understanding the weighting, is that a slug in the face and the tail as well as 2 in the belly?
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I was thinking the same thing when I first saw the schematic, but if you read the article he mentions he doesn't prefer through-drilling; instead he epoxies lead sinker eyes into the lure for head, tail & belly eyes. Those are the voids to receive them.

Hmmmm
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Regrind a speedbore bit to the curve you want. Make the pilot round so it follows the thru hole. If you feel compelled to make it really smooth you will have more work to do.

How do I regrind a speedbore bit?

I like what Frech's friend did: Heat the hell out of a carraige bolt head and burn the cup into the face.
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Actually, it would be grind. I just do it with a wheel chucked in my drill press, holding the bit in my hand. Make the shape you want and with a little bevel you have a cutting edge. The more symmetrical you make it, the smoother it cuts.

The problem with this is that it forces you to cut the cup parallel to the body and through hole, when good poppers have the cup cut parallel to the face slope.

There are large round inflatable sanding bulbs with specially shaped sandpaper cups for shaping wooden spoons, but they are expensive and look like they'd clog up too fast.

Gibbs reportedly used a stack of some sort of narrow slitting saw blades of different diameters to form a large diameter curved molding blade, but if and where you can get those I've no idea.

I've been using the Atom 2 oz popper since the 70's. I've tried a bunch of times to copy it and its not all that easy. It is still one of my best go to plugs. I've landed some huge stripers on them and if worked right will out fish just about anything out there. as far as using them at night well I always do and have landed some nice fish on them on those nights the bass seem to be closed mouthed.I learned that poppers at night work great. The belly weight in them makes them swim nice. Just hold on in the current and you'll see they swim as good as many of the good swimmers out there.

George: In your opinion, what size sphere do you think would give the appropriate cup depth in a Frech-sized popper (1⅛")?

For arc comparisons, below are relative spheres at 1", 1½" and 2".

I have to admit that I don't think I could pull this off.

I'll try and take a pic of a bit tonite if i can find one in the drop zone I call a shop.

When I would cut a popper face I put the ball rasp in the drill chuck in my lathe. I then held the plug in my right hand and shaped the popper face. Doing it this way allows you to go any depth you want, any diameter. Even shape the face to an oval plug body and have the same land area all around the cup. Start by hitting the center of the face with a forstner bit. This gives the ball rasp a good bite. Be careful, if you slip your knuckle skin stays on the ball rasp.

Hi Bill. I do the same thing in the drill press, but the largest sphere I have is 1" and I always go too deep trying to keep the cup even when attempting to keep it shallow. A bigger sphere sure would make it easier.

I'm quoting myself here, but...I picked up a 1/2" carriage bolt today to get an idea what kind of arc a 1/2" carriage bolt with a 1" head has on it. After taking some measurements, the arc on the head is approximate to a 1.8" sphere.

I looked at the inflatable bulb numbskull referenced above at Woodcraft; it's 1¾" in diameter. The employees let me assemble it with a sanding sleeve and it just didn't look like a symmetrical sphere if you sanded the piece at an angle, which you'd have to do because there's no sanding material dead-center. The sphere, pump and sleeves were about $75 as well -- too expensive an experiment.

I came across a website where a guy shows how to make sanding spheres out of foam, with sanding pads attached via Velcro. For bowls and such, I can see where the flexibility of foam is needed, but for a popper face sanded into birch I would think you'd need solid backing. I'm thinking of trying to create one from birch using the Velcro idea to attach a spiral-cut sanding pad.

This is a great thread, thanks to everyone for your input and work so far, its making me want to make a cigar popper!
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I'd be looking for 4" diameter. The cup is at an angle so it needs to cover more than 1 1/8 ". The Gibbs polaris has a very shallow cup.
Too deep and the plug grabs too quickly and tends to cartwheel or chug.

Someone on SOL years back posted a system where they turned a ball between centers on their lathe (think of a baseball with a dowel through it) then glued sandpaper onto the ball and shaped their poppers. I tried it but couldn't get the sandpaper to stay on the curved surface very long.

As for shaping by hand, I find the rasp grabs as I come across one quadrant of the plug and ruins things. Trying to use a guide doesn't work since the face is at an angle and unless you want a face to match the balls diameter you have to swing the plug while you rotate it.

Possibly there is a shaper cutter out there that would work, but I've not found it.

I use a cove bit with the bearing taken off in my drill press......works good for me

George: I just took a look at a 3.5 oz Gibbs Polaris.; you’re weren’t kidding, that is a very shallow cup. The head is about 1.25” thick here. I’m sure there is some variation, but on mine there is a perfectly circular, 1.125” cup sanded into the slanted face. It’s approximately .140” deep. Approximately a 4.5” sphere would be needed to create that arc, so that was a good estimation.

Using the Polaris as a guide, a 1.125” circumference popper (like the W-Y) would call for a cup 1” wide, which would leave a 1/16” rim around the middle of the slanted face. Proportionally, the cup depth should be about .126” which calls for a sphere approximately 2.5”.

Frech mentions in the article the importance of making his poppers exactly the same, but I imagine he had some variation because he tooled the cup by hand. It would be great to see an original W-Y to get a better idea of the cup, but I guess it's time to start experimenting with the cupped face to see if it's possible to get a copy to mimic the differing actions (including swimming) he mentions in the article.

BTW, Skippy -- sorry to walk all over your thread.

No need to apologize my friend i am happy there is this much activity, allot of what i was trying to figure out/understand along with what i was thinking about is coming out, i love it keep it coming.

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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