epoxy weekend...
 

I actually got to the point where I was in the middle of so much stuff I ran out of room to hang them. I kept putting off the paint & epoxy. So far I've only dropped 2 :splat:

Here's a few needles that were leftover from needlefish month, there was a real nice black &silver one that got dropped, and that lone popper was part of an experiment from earlier in the year. I think the belly hook is too far forward on it but we'll see.

The Mack and wonderbread darter were 2 survivors from the set I over sealed. They are hyrdro oriented and only have a single belly hook. The yellow,black and herring darter are from the 'replacement' batch. They are not hydro oriented, so I used 2 belly hooks on them and I'm just hoping the weight of the hardware will be good enough to make them sit right. The protypes were good. The top 2 are fully sealed but I'm tired of bending hook hangers so the black one and the rest of the batch will just have swivels.

nice work, how do those darters run? mid to high?

And most of a big batch of pencils I made for a new rod. These are heavier than my normal ones. The big ones are 3.5-4 oz and the smaller ones are around 3.25. There are a few more yellows ones that I still need to wire up but they'll have to wait till next time...

Some are canal specials and some are just round and there are a few that are kind of in between. Every time I pick up that bottom one on the left side I like it more and more. It has a flat/curved over front but the flat part only extends back as far a the swivel...

Darters are funny. Each one is a always a little different. I'll actually take them all down to test them to see how each works. The line tie on the yellow one is more forward than I'd like, which should make it run shallower than the others but we'll see.

Awesome work!!!

Sweet stuff. You should do well with them

Very nice work. I notice you are fully sealing the darters and needles plugs, is that to try to protect maple from taking on water?

beautiful, looks like you are ready to roll!

Serious stuff and plenty of it. Well done. :kewl:

Thats part of it as I have not used maple very much. I fully sealed some offcenter stuff I did last year and they held up really well, so I wanted to try it on some other styles and compare to my regular versions w/ swivels and grommets..

Its funny how going into a new season you don't really know what your 'goto' color/pattern will be.

2 years ago Yellow,white & squid worked great for me and I did great on some home made tins when the peanuts were around. I never even saw a mackerel that season. So I spent 1/2 of last winter messing with tins, and I never even found any peanuts, and I bet I had less than a dozen fish on the tins.

When the mackerel showed up and stayed around and the big blues got mixed in I ran out of mack patterned stuff pretty quickly. I tried to cover all the basics but whatever color works for me I bet I won't have enough of it...

Beautiful work DJ. :btu:

How have you found the epoxy to hold up over the tail wrap?

Thoose are sweet,nice work!

Nice clean stuff, good luck with em, hope you go large

looks like you have some fine ammo, loaded for bear so to speak..... love the olive white needle.. a very productive color for me the last few years...