some heavy swimmers

[hunan]

4 basic food groups: white/black/yellow/wonderbread

[Karl F]

Very Nice Repaint, and Great New ones!

Amazing how many old plugs I've seen with the lead core wrap.. and how and where it was applied.. innovate as needed.. also seen what must have been old "favorites" that had split, but lovingly wired up, to keep 'em together... Great Learning oppurtunity, examining old plugs ya come across.

[numbskull]

Your father's plug looks to be an old wooden atom. Most were unweighted, but Bob Pond did make a version with a long slug of lead along the tail wire (I think it was 2 3/4 x 1/4 but if you want to know for sure pm me and I'll dig out the xray next week) and sometimes a straighter taper to the tail. It looks like your father was reduplicating that idea.

[Diggin Jiggin]

Originally Posted by numbskull

Your father's plug looks to be an old wooden atom. Most were unweighted, but Bob Pond did make a version with a long slug of lead along the tail wire (I think it was 2 3/4 x 1/4 but if you want to know for sure pm me and I'll dig out the xray next week) and sometimes a straighter taper to the tail. It looks like your father was reduplicating that idea.

Thanks for the offer George. Yes my dad's plug is an old atom, and it is actually one of the ones with the tail weight. I'm not very knowledgable about the old stuff, I thinks it's a 40 but I'm not sure if that's what the ones with the tail weights were called. Even with the tail weight they wanted them heavier. I tried to duplicate what they wanted in a plug, but I didn't want to call mine 40's as they are not true to the original in a lot of ways.

When I went to make mine I was unable to get the old tailweight out. So while the hooks and solder were on it, I balanced the plug on the edge of a hacksaw blade to see where its balance point was, and marked where that point was. With the hooks and solder the balance point was about 1/4-3/8" above the tail grommet.

Then when I made mine, I tried to get them to balance at the same point. To do that I ended up needing 2" of lead, but I pour my own and they are bigger diameter than what was in there. Because my lead is bigger around I made the tails on mine a tiny bit thicker. I slid the front hook back far enough that it would not foul when I used split rings, and I did not round the heads enough but that was just accidental.

Here's the thing I found really interesting. With the hooks and solder on the old one, the point it balances at is 3 3/4" from the tail, which just happens to be the exact midpoint of the plug as it is 7 1/2 " long. It made me start wondering if that was how they determined how much solder to add. With the solder it is evenly balanced front half to back half. My dad just knew they always did a certain number of wraps of solder, so I wonder if the fact that it was balanced is just a concidence.

Here's what I've got in mine...The pencil line on the blank is where it balances with hooks and wire.

[Hilo_Kawika]

Hi Diggin Jiggin,

Thanks very much for sharing so many details of your dad's modification of the plug and your yours as well. I wonder if you'd give a little more detail about the solder wrapping. I'm new to this type of fishing and am having a little difficulty understanding where the solder was actually wrapped on the plug.

I also wonder if the wrapping was done just to add weight and/or to improve the casting qualities of the plug - greater distance / less tumbling. Any further thoughts you might have on this would be appreciated.