More on Plugs

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[QUOTE=Grapenuts;645571]

Originally Posted by steve

Speaking of plug buying, how are the NORTH BAR BOTTLE plugs and their unusual looking DARTER? QUOTE]

History running amuck again...If you do any research at all, you'll find that Stan Gibbs came out with that bottle darter first in his quest of the bottle plug[ the one you see today] that style/shape was Stan's first try, the top without lip..then came the next style with a small upper lip, till he was happy with the last almost full lip on top . Stan rejected the the first try and never looked back, never haveing put a patten on it..it was picked up by another and had a patten taken out on it in 1995-6, long after Stan came up with it.....Yes Mr. Welcome can claim having the patten, but the style/idea/shape was NOT his.

Many years ago while visiting Stan he took me upstairs into a room in his house to show me his own collection of one of a kinds and some prototypes he had made. One of these was his first iteration of what became his bottle plug. He told me it was based on a plug that a guy "from New Bedford" made. His first attempt was light blue with a white belly, w/decal eyes it was offset turned with flat or slab sides. body width was maybe an inch by about 2 inches +/- in depth. It had a wooden lip and looked like a a small hand held ice scraper or miniature bull dozer blade about an inch and a half wide and the head stock where it met the body was planed down in a sort of darter style. He said it swam okay but real tight and didn't cast very well. Based on that he made a few with round wider bodies and rounded the lip a bit and that became the design standard for his bottle plug. Incidently the Polaris also evolved from the elongated rounded body design of the casting swimmer whcih is the bottle plugs real name. Stan never called it a bottle plug. I was lucky enough to be given a few of the one off plugs from him eventually but he kept that one and somewhere in his belongings it may still exist.

He also cherished a plug he called the pogie plug that was yellow and resembled a pigmy bowling pin. It was as though he didn't want anyone to get thier hands on it.

The real facts.