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Sea Wolf, I hope you didn't take what I said the wrong way :-). I just wanted to make it clear that you and I don't know each other and didn't conspire here as supposed friends with supposed problems with Gibbs plugs ;-)
I notcied the change in the cut on the head of the darter the last time I bought a supply. It's stepped now, with angled cuts at each step. I have a theory on why they altered this plug and the bottle.
For a lot of people, bottles and darters are condition-specific, or location-specific, lures. They don't have as much built in action as a plastic minnow swimmer, or a metal lipped swimmer. The bottle's lip was designed, originally, to grab and dig in rough water or in fast current, where the other plugs either tumble or swim in too exaggerated a manner. In flat water with little or no current, they don't work right on a slow retrieve. Darters come thru currentless water like a piece of driftwood. Gibbs might have altered the head on both plugs in response to complaints that they "don't swim". So, you take a few blank bodies, play around with the taper and cut of what gives them their wiggle, and tank test them. Tank testing isn't a reflection of how these plugs will react under the right conditions, where most of the guys in areas where these plugs are most popular, will use them. Even feld-testing won't work unless the location is the right one. What concerns me most about the new lip on the bottle swimmer is that the flatter profile, while it might give them better calm water swimming properties, might as a consequence detract from their ability to bite and dig in rough surf. I have to say that the new cut on the darter doesn't seem to have resulted in it being less productive, at least since I became aware of it. I guess I have a mixed bag of larger darters, still, and never really check what head one has when I reach into my bag in the dark. But, all of my small darters have the new cut and they have been producing fish.
The only screw-eye plugs Gibbs makes are the darters, the Stan Gibbs poppers, and the 5/8 oz bottle plug. According to Gibbs, all screw-eye plugs are made from birch, not pine. Their early needlefish plugs also had screw-eyes.
Chris---I don't think it's the hooks themselves. Take any brand of lures that has open-eyed hooks attached, be it Superstrike, Atom, Yankee or Gibbs, and you will find a high failure rate right out of the package. Mass marketed plugs have to come with hooks attached, and a lot of people will not buy a plug if "something looks wrong"--like, fer instance, if the pieces of the hook eye aren't flush. Personally, I would rather the plugs be sold without hooks so I can attach them myself, using the style I want. But the average guy doesn't, and the manufacturers, I believe, bend the eye back and forth if the guy attaching it doesn't get the pieces flush on the first shot. Or, they're buying lesser quality Mustads than what's available to the public. Only two things I can think of, because every open-eye I attach doesn't snap under light pliers pressure until it gets corroded.
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