Sand eel swimmer... How to.

[Hookset]

Very impressive, some great work.

I am very interested in the process of developing a plug. For example, I am sure you start out with an idea of what you are trying to develop, like here a sand eel swimmer. And then what?

Do you then come up with the shape and start playing with hook and weight placement? Do you do this by making several with different placements and see which swims the best, or just make one first and see how it swims? Are there some general guidelines you follow, such as weight always goes central and can vary a certain amount or goes under the thickest point?

How about number of hooks, size and placement?

Again, great work and thanks for taking the time to share all the details, I read through this many times....

[Backbeach Jake]

We're very fortunate to have such generous plug building masters here..my personal thanks to you all.

[Rockfish9]

Originally Posted by Hookset

Very impressive, some great work.

I am very interested in the process of developing a plug. For example, I am sure you start out with an idea of what you are trying to develop, like here a sand eel swimmer. And then what?

Do you then come up with the shape and start playing with hook and weight placement? Do you do this by making several with different placements and see which swims the best, or just make one first and see how it swims? Are there some general guidelines you follow, such as weight always goes central and can vary a certain amount or goes under the thickest point?

How about number of hooks, size and placement?

Again, great work and thanks for taking the time to share all the details, I read through this many times....

For me, it starts with a need... in this instance, the need was for a slim profile swimmer... the idea, like most idea, was not/is not new.. or mine originaly, in this case, Danny Pinkney inspired the idea long before me, I liked the profile ( although I've only seen it on line, never in person) ... so knowing roughly the size of the plug I needed, I spun several bodies out of scrap pine....dipped them in polycrylic to seal them for testing , rigged them using cheap galvinized wire and fitted each with a differant style lip... several holes were drilled in the bellies ( one was tail weighted), in differant location on each plug, each were weighted differantly, each hole ( un ocupied) was filled with modeling clay, which could easily removed to change size and location of weight... after swim testing, i settled on a profile I liked, copied it to a template so I could run them on the duplicator and repeated the process again using WRC.AYC and Birch.... after several trial and errors, i settled on the design i now have, using WRC and the weighting scheme...

[Eric Roach]

Thank you for this tutorial -- very helpful.

[Hookset]

I swam my sand eels today after making the adjustments you suggested, flag on the back and bend eye down. Man, these have a great swimming action. Thanks for posting the build instructions!