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Assinipi has got most of the questions under contol, I saw one of his bottles at the show this weekend and it was excellent. A couple of things I can add are I keep the top of the plug pretty short in respect to the curve of the face. In other words I don't dig out the middle of the plug very much. I don't know what deeper shapes in the middle will do because I've never tried that. You can see a diagram of the shape I like in the thread on bottle shaping. Keeping the sides even is also important, one longer than the other will cause it to swim to one side. Another thing that makes a big difference is the front loop. I use a jig to form my through wires and they are perfectly round and all come out the same. I still have to adjust a good portion of the plugs when I swim them for the first time. If the loop is off to one side or the other the plugs just wants to drag to one side and have no action at all. It is something that is easy to overlook. When you test swim a plug and the action isn't there a lot of other things come to mind before you think about adjusting the front loop. Too much weight or wrong shape etc. I've had a few that didn't do anything when I first put them in the water and a simple loop adjustment had them swimming nicely. As far as the weight goes a little weight helps quite a bit when placed in front of the belly hook. Whether it's under the chin or more towards the belly, it helps make the front of the plug dig and get started especially if you are in some type of current. Fred is right about too much weight dampening the action though. That takes a little trial and error to get down, a lot depends on the density of the wood you're using.
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